


Another Minor Apocrypha

by outlier



Series: thanks a lot, red k [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Alpha Kara Danvers, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst with a Happy Ending, But only occasionally, F/F, G!P, Omega Alex Danvers, Red Kryptonite, under the influence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-06-29 17:44:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15734313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outlier/pseuds/outlier
Summary: Kara's under the influence of Red Kryptonite, primed to rut, and outside the DEO screaming for Alex. Alex tries to diffuse the situation. Whether that's brave or foolhardy is a matter of perspective, but it certainly has consequences.





	1. Well, that happened

**Author's Note:**

> If you read 'An Imprint, Imperfect', you might be thinking: Hey. I just read something about Kara getting all hopped up on Red K and instigating something that resulted in all kinds of troubles between herself and Alex.
> 
> And, yes. Yes you did. I had two similar ideas at pretty much the same time. I wrote them at the same time and they are certainly coterminous. It just happened, okay.
> 
> Be warned. There's a scene containing sexual content between people under the age of 18 in the first chapter. It's marked with ******** above and below if you want to skip over it. It is not especially explicit, but perhaps more explicit than some would find tolerable.

“ _GIVE HER TO ME!_ ”

From all outward appearances, the fact that Supergirl was a) primed to rut; b) affected by Red K; and, c) hovering 15 feet in the air outside of the DEO, eyes blazing with the threat of heat vision even as she bellowed for Alex, was barely even ruffling Alex’s calm.

Hank, standing beside her, kept his gaze focused on the bank of monitors showing the unfolding situation. “We can have snipers in position in 2 minutes.”

He’d mentioned it before, but the sharp shake of Alex’s head had urged him to hold back on giving the order.

“You remember last time.”

Hank did remember last time. He remembered Kara wreaking havoc on the CatCo building, throwing it’s proprietress off of the roof, and generally engaging in destructive mayhem. He remembered Alex’s broken arm, a dozen unconscious and disarmed agents, and the feel of cuffs around his wrists after he’d revealed himself for who he truly was.

“I do,” he said, voice measured, “and I also remember that we have a much more effective way of dealing with this now.”

It had taken months, but Alex had managed to transform the properties of Max Lord’s weapon into a serum. One vial delivered via tranq gun, and Supergirl would be herself again.

The only problem was, Supergirl didn’t seem particularly amenable to being peacefully tranqed.

“Give me the antidote.” Alex didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I’ll deliver it.”

Even if she hadn’t seen it in the reflection of the monitors, Alex was pretty sure she would have _felt_ Hank roll his eyes.

“Explain something to me, Agent Danvers,” he said, arms crossed across his chest. “Tell me how it makes any operational sense to give the momentarily deranged superhero threatening this facility what she wants?”

Alex’s jaw clenched as she swung around to face J’onn. “She won’t hurt me,” she said, her voice low and intense and her eyes flicking around nervously to make sure no one was in hearing distance.

J’onn snorted. “Like hell she won’t. She’s barely holding herself in check.”

Another enraged howl rattled through the speakers attached to the monitors.

“Because I’m in here, and she won’t risk attacking if there’s a chance I might get hurt. I get her to calm down and I give her the antidote,” Alex argued gently, closing her eyes for a second at the sound of Kara’s cry. “No one gets hurt. Not her, not me, not anyone else.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” J’onn said, his voice tightening with anger, “right now, Supergirl is an Alpha in rut and the only thing she seems to want is you. An unmated, very human Omega.”

 “I’m on a daily dose of suppressants and not due to go into heat for another month. Kara might be impaired, but I’m not.” Her shoulders stiffened even as a blush began to race across her cheeks. “And I’m not technically unmated. I’m not mated, exactly, but I’m not exactly unmated either. It’s… complicated.”

J’onn’s brows raised in skepticism and surprise because he’d seen her file, knew the status of every agent under his control, and Alex Danvers’ file most definitely read ‘Omega, unmated’.

“We don’t have time for me to explain.” Anxiety pooled hotly in Alex’s stomach. “You can look, just… Just realize it’s not something we talk about, okay, and it’s never happened again.”

She took a moment to fortify herself before she let her mind drift over memories, hoping J’onn would only see what she chose to show him.

********

********

Her mom’s been working late for weeks now, not getting in until after midnight. Between them, Alex and Kara manage, cooking and doing laundry and watching television and doing homework in a house that’s been far too silent since her Dad… since her Dad… But today is different, and Alex thinks she might know why. It’s always been clear what she’d be. Smart, ambitious Alex, who took home prizes from science fairs and who had, more than once, used the threat of her fists to keep Kara away from those who said mean things or looked to take advantage. She’d be an alpha, like her mother, and keep on rampaging through life.

Only, she’s pretty sure this isn’t how it feels to be an alpha. Alphas don’t curl up in bed, sweating and hunched around themselves and wet down to their thighs, yearning and aching and weak, so weak. The pain starts low in her belly and boils up until she’s nauseous with it, until it makes her thoughts sluggish and disconnected. She yearns for something, knows what it is but tries to pretend she doesn’t because that’s not who she is, some cowering thing so desperate for an alpha’s cock that it won’t matter who gives it to her.

There’s a creak of wooden floorboards as someone moves in the hallway. “Alex?”

A  flash and Kara’s there, concerned, rubbing her hand up and down Alex’s back soothingly, not sure what’s happening but desperate to help. She’s wrapped around her, pressing soft, reassuring kisses to the side of Alex’s face, to all of the skin she can reach, until her lips land on Alex’s neck and Alex groans. It feels so good, so right. She takes a deep breath, grips the sheets tight, and lets her head drop back so that Kara has easy access. There’s a moment of hesitation and she wants, wants, _wants_ before Kara shifts closer, her kisses transforming. It’s not comfort anymore, or at least not just comfort. Kara’s kisses linger, open-mouthed and hot, and Alex can feel each of them all through her.

Alex turns into her, blindly seeking relief, heady and overwhelmed and not thinking beyond _knowing_ what she needs. She’s alarmed when Kara starts to shudder and pant. She tries to focus, sees Kara’s wide eyes widen even further with confusion. The hand on her hip, and she doesn’t remember when it landed there, tightens hard enough to bruise. Alex gasps, pushes into the pain, and feels nothing but slick and heat and want and submission.

It’s too soon. Kara has another year, if not more, before she presents, but perhaps it’s yet another way in which she evinces Kryptonian exceptionalism. Kara whines, tearing at the fabric suddenly holding her captive, and Alex’s hand finds her hot and hard inside her jeans. The new appendage is strange and heavy and somehow enough to take away Alex’s ability to think rationally. Otherwise, she wouldn’t let Kara flip her onto her stomach and pull up on her hips until she was on her knees. She wouldn’t cry out in relief when she was filled – first with fingers and then with more – as if it was the most natural thing in the world, whimpering and begging as Kara heaves and bucks and growls above her. She wouldn’t come when Kara buries her teeth in her skin, in the space between her shoulder blade and her spine because Kara’s only midway through what will turn out to be her final growth spurt and not yet tall enough to reach Alex’s neck, no matter how much she strains.

They lay together after, Kara’s knot tying them together while the blood dries on Alex’s back, and Alex has never felt more loved. Kara dusts kisses against her back and whispers soothing, comforting things, and they drift off to sleep, still joined, only to jolt apart when Eliza gasps from the doorway

********

********

“Do you still have it?” J’onn asked, looking her steadily in the eyes even as Alex did everything possible to avoid meeting his.

The bite was faint now, never reinforced. Truthfully, it and any bond it implied should have faded long ago.

Should have.

“Yes,” Alex said, fighting through her embarrassment. She didn’t say more, and hoped that J’onn wouldn’t ask her to clarify their relationship. The truth was, she didn’t know what the answer would be. She didn’t know how to parse through the guilt she’d carried like an open wound for years, or the wall she’d built between them deliberately, or the way she’d told Kara they couldn’t be that to one another. The way she’d convinced herself that it was for the best to pull away, to let Kara live a normal life. On top of everything else Kara had to deal with, Alex didn’t want to add the burden of being saddled with the rumor that she’d fucked – _was_ fucking – her foster sister.

Hank’s gaze flashed to the bank of monitors, deceptively benign. “You know what this is, then?”

Alex swallowed hard. She looked at Kara, fierce and angry at being denied what she believed to be hers, no longer beholden to any social conditioning or niceties that would prompt her to obscure or diffuse her intentions. The glow of her eyes seemed to intensify, and Alex steeled herself. She wasn’t going to allow this to get any further out of hand. She wasn’t going to let Kara get hurt, or to hurt anyone else, no matter the cost.

“I can handle myself. She won’t hurt me.” She ignored the doubt in J’onn’s expression. “I’ll subdue her. You work on finding out who did this and why.”

She eschewed body armor. It wouldn’t help, and with Kara in the state she was, Alex couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t be taken as a sign of aggression or defiance. As much as she had faith that Kara wouldn’t hurt her, even as compromised as she was, she also didn’t want to antagonize her deliberately. Red K swept away her inhibitions; that Kara Danvers was mostly inhibitions made it even more difficult to predict what the effect would be. So, Alex prepared herself to go out and meet the most powerful being in the world in only her black BDU pants and a black polo with a tracker beacon hidden beneath the collar, with the case containing the antidote shoved into one of her pockets. At the last minute, she grabbed a prototype delivery mechanism designed to look like a pen. Instead of a ballpoint, it had a kryptonite tipped needle encased in lead to hide it from sensitive Kryptonian eyes until the dose contained within could be delivered. She clipped it onto the vee of her polo, squared her shoulders, and forced her mind clear of all of the possible ways in which this could go poorly.

\------

The look on Kara’s face was smug as Alex came to stand in front of her, feet wide and shoulders set with the knowledge that the eyes of the DEO were upon them.

“You wanted to see me,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest and looking off to the left of Kara’s shoulder. It wasn’t a show of submission but one of irritation, this refusal to meet her eyes, but the wave of superpowered pheromones that swept over her a second later took any defiance she might have been nurturing and brushed it neatly aside.

Kara had always been so careful with her, conscientious of the delicate balance between Alex’s pride and her omega status. Outside of the rare times when Kara was caught by surprise, she was meticulous about reining in displays of dominance and calls for submission, so much so that she’d often been mistaken for a beta. With Red K coursing through her system, taking away the barriers she’d set for herself, she was no longer bothered by trivial concerns like holding back. This was not Kara Danvers, who moved through the world trying not to infringe upon it. This was Supergirl, last daughter of Krypton and an alpha at the prime of her strength and power.

The first hint, or maybe the fiftieth, that she was in trouble settled low in Alex’s stomach as she instinctively bared her neck with a keening whine and sank to her knees before even registering the movements, unable to do anything else in the face of the overwhelming power of Kara’s call to her.

“Finally—” Kara grinned as she leaned over Alex, fingers brushing through her hair delicately— “you’re where you belong.”

In retrospect, it had been silly to think she’d be able to handle the situation. Kara moved faster than the eye could see, far too fast for anyone to even think of doing something to stop her. In a span of seconds, they were gone. Left behind in a small pile sat Alex’s cell phone, the tracking device, and the lead-lined case with its vials of antidote.

\-----

She felt the unmistakable stirrings of her heat somewhere above the vast Canadian tundra. Her mind had been on a loop – Supergirl, Kara, _Alpha_ – sublimated beneath the will of Kara’s call. She’d tried desperately to hold on to herself, to the bits of her that could still pretend at rational thought, but it was useless. There was a plan, she seemed to remember. Kara needed to be saved, because she wasn’t herself. Kara needed her.

Kara needed her and she needed Kara.

They landed in hard packed snow at the door to the Fortress and Alex shivered as Kara let her go.

“Soon,” Kara soothed, lifting the hundred-ton key effortlessly, and something deep within Alex preened at her alpha’s show of strength.

She’d burned through whatever suppressants still lingered in her system long before they’d landed, her heat triggered and raging through her. Some part of Alex protested that this wasn’t normal, that the way she felt was stronger than the strongest heat she could remember by a factor of 10, but what did that matter? Kara was here and hard for her and she wouldn’t have to turn to unsatisfying stopgap measures this time. Not with her true alpha ready to see to her heat. She could be filled. She could be knotted. She could be mated. She could be bred.

As the door swung open, Kara turned to her, expression mournful. “I’ve waited so long,” she said, still for a moment before she moved, lightning quick. Alex was hoisted up, legs wrapping instinctively around Kara’s waist as Kara bore her into the interior of the Fortress. She looked around wildly, seeking some place to lay Alex, but they were surrounded by nothing but ice. Not that Alex would have cared, not in that moment. Kara’s cock was hard and pressing into her through the fabric of her pants and Kara’s Supergirl uniform and Alex was whining – she knew she was, desperate and needy and she’d have been mortified by it at any other time – but she couldn’t help it. It felt so good, Kara hard against her, but she needed more. She needed to be stretched around her, taking, needed Kara to stop teasing and fill her.

Kara growled in frustration and Alex felt herself go liquid in response. The look on her alpha’s face was angry and fierce; Alex wanted that focus on her. She wanted to see Kara’s lips pulled back in a snarl as she thrust into her, and fuck, there was some reason why she shouldn’t want this, but why? What could be more right than to be with Kara in that moment and in that place?

She heard the rip even as she felt cloth cutting into her skin. The thick cotton of her pants parted under Kara’s grip with the ease of a tissue, her fingers running along seams and leaving them split in her wake. Alex held on tight as Kara pulled the remnants away, leaving nothing but tatters of cloth abandoned on the icy ground. She shivered, not from the cold, and pressed her face into the crook of Kara’s neck.

“I’m going to finish what I started,” Kara said, her voice uncharacteristically firm. Alex licked the skin below her ear, needing the taste of Kara on her tongue. Kara huffed in response, one hand sliding underneath Alex’s ass to support her as the other fumbled to push her skirt out of the way. Alex wanted to help but couldn’t. Her hands were in Kara’s hair and she was leaving a trail of kisses along the column of Kara’s throat. She bit into skin that wouldn’t bruise or break, aware she was wet and messy against the front of Kara’s uniform but completely unconcerned. The words called to her; the bite Kara had left all those years ago was a phantom pain, an unfinished promise.

Alex managed to pull back long enough to find Kara’s mouth. She kissed her, fingertips digging desperately into Kara’s scalp and her tongue dragging along Kara’s lower lip. She tasted Kara’s sigh of relief as she felt the tip of her cock press against her, hot skin against hot skin, and drove her hips down to try and capture it. Kara slid against her, through her, the line of her shaft dragging over Alex’s clit. She nearly sobbed with the pleasure of it, panting against Kara’s mouth as she slid a hand down between them.

She found Kara’s cock slick and hard, thrusting into her grip with short, desperate movements. It was hard to focus both on kissing Kara and on positioning her so that she’d be able to enter her – _finally_ – so Alex once again buried her face in Kara’s neck. She jerked her hips forward even as she guided Kara’s cock back, and would have tumbled out of Kara’s grip had her hand not been splayed wide across her back. Kara sank inside like she was built specifically for that purpose, for the sole intended goal of filling Alex, and Alex moaned, any shyness or reserve long abandoned. Her legs locked loosely around Kara’s waist, ankles crossed, as Kara moved her with ease. She became a ragdoll in Kara’s grip, giving herself over to the feel of Kara using her to ride her cock.

“You’re going to take my knot.” Kara’s breath was hot against her ear. “I’m going to make you mine.”

Alex screamed her assent. She was so close, had been since she’d first felt Kara press against her. It wouldn’t take much to tumble over into climax, but Alex knew what she wanted. She wanted the knot she could feel forming at the base of Kara’s cock. She wanted to be tied to and stretched tight around her, and pulled hard at Kara’s hair to make sure she had her attention. Hard enough so that she could meet Kara’s eyes, gone dark and savage. In her periphery, she could see the flex of Kara’s shoulder muscles as she worked, could feel the contraction of her abdominal muscles as she drove her hips up into Alex. The muscles and tendons in her neck were pulled tight, and it felt right. Kara was near feral with her instinct to claim, and Alex loved it.

“Do it. Do it, Kara. I need it. Please, I need it…” The words trailed off into a moan as Kara acted on them. She moved her hands from Alex’s ass to her lower back and let gravity take over, thrusting her hips up as Alex’s full weight pressed down. At the first hint of stretch Alex dug her nails into Kara’s shoulders. Her eyes slid closed, trapping her in a world of nothing but sensation. She felt herself open, her breath catching as the stretch started to sting and burn. She wanted it, though, wanted to feel like there was no way she could take it but to take it anyway. Kara’s strength and her slick made it inevitable, which meant she could relax into it, eyes closed and head thrown back as Kara sank ever and ever deeper. Her heart raced and her breathing grew choppy; she whimpered, rocking her hips in an effort to race ahead of the inevitability of it.

Kara’s fingers tightened on her hips, digging bruises into her skin. With a growl, she pulled Alex down even as she thrust up and suddenly she was buried deep, her knot nestled inside. Alex stiffened and hissed in a startled breath. She brought her head up, looking at Kara in surprise for a moment before slumping forward, a puppet with its strings cut, to cling desperately to Kara as she rocketed into orgasm. She was aware of the heat of Kara’s breath against her neck a second before teeth dug into her skin, and Alex whimpered. Her skin broke under the pressure, adding a sharp undercut of pain to the pleasure that washed through her. A moment later and Kara was moving again, tight rolls of her hips that ground her knot against Alex in a way that left her boneless. Kara’s teeth in her neck, the heat and throb of Kara cumming inside her… everything played into a feedback loop and she screamed herself hoarse as she took and took and took.

\------

“Alex, you need to stop.”

“Stop what?” Alex snapped, wiping angrily at the blood running down her arm. “Stop doing my fucking job?”

J’onn sighed. “Stop being so reckless. Everyone here knows you’re a good agent. You don’t need to take unnecessary risks to prove it.”

“Oh, they do?” Alex looked up, eyes flashing furiously. She dropped the blood soaked wad of cotton onto the medbay’s stainless steel counter, wound forgotten. “Are you sure about that? Because I’m pretty sure that what everyone I work with knows is that I’m nothing more than a stupid omega whore who dropped down onto her knees and bared her neck in submission in front of all of them. I’m pretty sure they know I spent 5 days getting fucked and mated instead of doing my fucking job because I’m just like every other omega out there who’ll spread for the nearest alpha available.” She blinked back sudden, angry tears. “Fuck.”

“I think they know you went out to meet a Red Kryptonite-impaired Supergirl unarmed,” J’onn interrupted gently, “because you’re brave, Alex, and because you didn’t want anyone to get hurt. You can’t judge your worth as an agent on the outcome of an extreme situation. Even if you did, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You completed the mission, Agent Danvers. No casualties. You neutralized the threat.”

Alex felt a wave of shame roll through her as she remembered everything she’d done to keep that threat occupied, even if her thinking at the time had been anything but tactical. “Yeah. Neutralized.”

Though J’onn wanted to reach out with the calming touch of his mind, he held back, aware that Alex had had too much of her body betraying her in response to the impositions – willingly or unwillingly – of others. “That’s going to need stitches,” he said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder.

More scars, Alex thought. Like the ones Kara had left on her neck, two jagged semi-circles mirroring one another, placed high enough that even upraised collars and turtlenecks couldn’t cover them completely. They’d healed enough that she couldn’t justify wearing bandages any longer, not that the bandages had been all that effective at hiding what was behind them. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Supergirl on Red K hadn’t been especially shy at broadcasting just what she’d wanted from Alex. They were confirmation, that was all, of what everyone already knew. Supergirl had picked a toy from amongst their ranks, used her, and marked her.

The doctor worked quickly and efficiently, stitching up the gash left by a Khund’s claw and drawing a vial of blood for routine testing for any alien or other material that might have made it into her bloodstream as a result. She even ran soft, gloved fingers over the mostly healed bite mark, ostensibly looking for any late-developing signs of infection, and Alex tried not to jerk away self-consciously.

“We’ll have the results back in the morning,” the doctor said, already typing her notes into Alex’s patient file. “I’ll let you know if they come back with any sign of infection, parasite, etc. You know the drill.”

Alex did. She slipped off the table, suddenly incredibly weary and not even bothering with a shower before leaving the DEO behind her.

\------

The flashes of memory come to her without warning, in the middle of a meeting or at night, tucked under the sheets and wishing desperately for a dreamless sleep.

She feels Kara on top of her, her legs propped up on Kara’s shoulders so that she’s bent nearly in half as Kara moves over her. Kara’s eyes lock on hers, her voice low as she speaks. “You won’t abandon me again,” she says, and the words might be threatening if not for the thick current of heartbreak underlying them. “Not again. Not now. You’re mine now. You’ve always been mine and I won’t let you, Alex. I won’t let you.” In response, Alex keens and clenches tight around Kara’s cock. She bares her ravaged neck, a murmured litany of “Yours, I’m yours, I’m yours,” a soft counterpoint to Kara’s words of possession.

They lay together. Kara doesn’t tire but Alex does, and when that happens, Kara holds her tightly. She traces the scar on Alex’s back with reverent fingers. “Did you think you could hide it?” she asks, soft, silky hair tickling against Alex’s skin as Kara paints the scar with kisses. “Did you think I couldn’t smell it on you? Did you think I didn’t know? All these years you’ve denied me, when we both knew you were already mine.” Her fingers sneak up to the still aching bite mark on Alex’s neck, and Alex can hear the satisfaction in her voice. “Not anymore. No more hiding, Alex.”

Kara shifts, draws her tongue against the fresh bite mark, and Alex feels nothing but bliss.

\------

Days went by without a single sighting of Kara. At least, not a sighting by Alex. She went to work. That, Alex knew. She responded to DEO calls or emergencies sussed out by superhearing, saving school children and kittens but skittering away from Alex any time they happened to be in proximity. When Alex did see her, she looked mournful, on the verge of tears or of dropping to her knees in apology. The fact that she couldn’t be furious at anyone other than herself made Alex even more fruitlessly furious. She couldn’t blame Kara, even though she wanted to. Maybe if Kara had come to her, if they’d talked about the way she felt about Alex before the ability to be rational was taken from her, they could have reached a solution that didn’t involve the possession of the memory by all of her coworkers of Alex dropping to her knees and baring her neck in front of Supergirl. Maybe she wouldn’t have had to fly back from the Fortress in Hank’s arms, abandoned by a Kara returned to herself, distraught and unable to cope with what she’d done.

Maybe… Maybe… There were so many maybes it was easy to be overwhelmed by them.

Maybe Kara would still be able to look at her. Maybe Alex wouldn’t find herself with memories of the Kara from before blending into memories of Kara from after. Maybe she wouldn’t see something that reminded her of Kara only to have that memory twist and shift in her mind, starting with the image of Kara laughing around a spoonful of ice cream and ending with Kara looking down at her with a incongruously gentle smile on her face, fingers shifting through her hair as Alex worked diligently to take her cock down her throat. Youthful indiscretions could be excused, could be played off, but heat or no, how exactly was Alex supposed to process the barely weeks old memory of staring up at Kara in blissful adoration as she did _that_?

She was torn from her thoughts by the ding of an email alert.

 _Your results are in. Come see me_ , it read, with the signature block of the doctor she’d seen the day before, and Alex sighed. Then again, maybe an alien infection was just what she needed to take her mind off everything. If it was especially virulent, perhaps she’d be put into an induced coma. She could only hope.

“Got your results back,” the doctor said unnecessarily, frowning at the screen of her tablet. “We found something a little unexpected.”

Alex would have barked at her to spit it out, but she was just so very tired.

“I can only surmise that the preparation we used wasn’t appropriately calibrated to deal with the strength of the alien genetic imperative,” she continued, and Alex snapped to attention, frowning. Had she lost time somewhere along the way? She was pretty sure she would have remembered if she’d been administered some kind of medication following her tussle with the Khund. It didn’t seem likely. Her stitches were obviously still fresh, even despite the accelerated healing compound that was routinely administered to injured field agents.

“I’m going to need you to be specific,” Alex said, feeling the beginning of a headache settle in behind her eyes.

The doctor looked up, and Alex saw what she was sure was pity in her eyes. “You’re pregnant, Agent Danvers. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to pull you from the field.” She paused, expression softening. “You still have time to decide what you want to do.”

Alex felt herself detach neatly from time itself.

Pregnant? But how? It hadn’t happened before. Then again, that had only been the once, and Alex’s mom had taken her to the family planning clinic for an emergency shot as soon as she’d found them in bed together. This time she’d been with Kara as a highly potent, mature adult for almost a full week. She’d been on birth control. The hormonal concoction they’d administered on her return as a post-heat prophylactic had been given as an additional safeguard, extra protection just in case. Double the protection should have meant no worries. Had Kara’s so-called alien predominance, unrestrained as it’d been under the influence of Red K, been enough to bypass all of the protections Alex had taken?

Clearly, it had.

“Fuck,” Alex muttered, face in her hands. Tears smarted in her eyes and her jaw flexed, every muscle in her body winding tight in an instant. A hand landed on her shoulder but she jerked away. She didn’t need comfort from a virtual stranger. She didn’t need pity from one either.

She needed Kara to come out of hiding and talk to her, and she was tired of waiting.

\------

Eyes followed her as she stalked down the hallway. They had ever since it had happened. Some were curious, some supportive, some dark with implied knowledge. With those – always alphas, always stupid fucking alphas – Alex had to tell herself that no matter what they thought they knew about her now, the situation would not be helped if she drove her knee into the soft, vulnerable parts of them. She’d put up with leers and innuendo for years, less so in the professional environment of the DEO, but they were always going to be there. Some people had the sense to hide them away, but a savvy omega didn’t get as far as Alex had without being able to read what was barely hidden. Perform at 110% and she was a coworker, valued for what she could contribute. Falter even the slightest, and she was a cute enough diversion that they’d be happy to remind of her place.

She’d been reminded alright.

J’onn was in his office, scrolling through a report, when she pushed past a clearly flustered administrative assistant. “I don’t care what you have to do,” she said, not bothering with pleasantries or preamble, “but you get her in the same room as me.”

He regarded her for a moment, expression placid, and nodded.

\------

A few hours later, she was validated in her belief that J’onn could work miracles.

Kara was sitting on the other side of the table from her, arms crossed over her chest and shoulders slouched, looking like a kid waiting outside of the principal’s office and expecting expulsion. It was clear that the onus of starting the conversation had fallen on Alex, but the possible entry points were endless.

_Did you think hiding from me would solve things? Was it really your plan to never talk about when you got infected with Red K and we fucked like rabid wolves for nearly a week? How about that time you left me in the Fortress with a mating bite and no pants? Remember that?_

For the sake of expediency, she chose the thing that was sitting in the forefront of her mind.

“I’ve been pulled from field duty.”

Kara’s eyes snapped up. She looked even guiltier than she had a moment before, which Alex wouldn’t have thought possible. So guilty that it filled the room like a physical thing. So guilty Alex could feel it like the emotion was her own.

“No,” Kara protested immediately, rushing headlong into a conversation she’d been avoiding for weeks as if a dam had broken. “Why? It wasn’t your fault. It was me, all me. I kidnapped you. I held you there against your will. I did all of it, Alex. I made you do…” She trailed off as her face crumpled. Twin tears tracked down quickly reddening cheeks, and for a moment, she looked like she was going to crack; the deliberate effort to pull herself away from that edge was the visual equivalent of the slipshod reassembly of a broken plate. Alex watched as Kara’s expression turned from despairing to somber, and her hands flexed into fists on the table, knuckles blanching white. Exhaustion fell over her like a shadow, and she looked gaunt, tired, and 10 years older in the span of 30 seconds. “I should have turned myself in,” she continued softly, eyes flicking away. “You don’t deserve any of this. I’ll fix it. I promise. I’ll make sure everyone knows you didn’t want any of it. I’ll make sure they put you back in the field. I’ll make sure they know it’s my fault. They can’t do this to you, Alex. They can’t. You were just trying to do your job, and I…” She looked up at Alex and then away, teary-eyed and hopeless.

Alex’s anger flared and receded, searching for a target but unable to find one in Kara. “Kara, stop,” she said softly, shivering at the echoing resonance of Kara’s remorse and sorrow that seemed to be seeping through her very bones. She slid a hand over one of Kara’s clenched fists and squeezed, but might as well have been offering comfort to a stone. “We have a lot to talk about and we should have done it sooner, but I need you to listen to me, okay?” She waited until Kara met her eyes. She took in and released a deep breath, and said as clearly as she could, “What happened… it wasn’t like that. It could never be like that with you.”

Kara sat back hard enough for her chair to creak ominously. Her hand disappeared, leaving Alex’s alone on the table. “You don’t have to lie to me.” She looked down angrily, and Alex froze, footing lost. “You made it clear after the first time that you didn’t want me like that.”

Her voice broke over the last words, and Alex found herself suddenly blinking back sympathetic tears.

“Kara…”

“No,” Kara interrupted, implacable. “You made it clear, and I still came after you. I used your nature against you. Nothing else, the Red K… that doesn’t matter. You know how it works, Alex. Red K didn’t put it in my mind. It was already there. I couldn’t control it, but...” She looked up, miserably defiant and on the edge of breaking. “But maybe I didn’t want to control it.”

Alex stood abruptly, unable to stand the distance imposed by the table between them. She was around it in a few strides, hands cupping Kara’s cheeks as Kara gave in to her tears. It was as hard to see as it had been the first time, Kara’s shame and grief raw and painful, and Alex couldn’t take it. After the first Red K incident, after she’d worked through her anger and hurt at what Kara had said, she’d had time to think about what it might mean to have the ability to control her actions stripped away. She’d thought about what she might say or do if Red K affected her in the same way and cringed away in horror at the possibilities. Even at her darkest, Kara hadn’t left anyone dead.

“I’ve been angry at you.” Alex needed Kara to know. She could forgive her, knew she already had, but forgiveness didn’t obviate anger. “You abandoned me. You’ve avoided me. It hasn’t exactly been easy, coming back to work knowing that everybody _knows_.”

Kara looked up at her with the kind of pain reserved for her most devastating of memories. “I’m sorry,” she said, lips twisted into a grimace of bitter recrimination. “When you gave me the antidote and I came back to myself… I saw what I’d done. I can’t make that right, Alex. Nothing can make that right. What makes it even worse is that for a moment, I was proud. You were mine and you couldn’t hide it anymore.” Kara’s eyes flitted up to the bite on Alex’s neck even as she winced. “I kept waiting for someone to lock me away or for you to tell the world what I really am… a monster. I thought it might help if I stayed away. If you didn’t have to see me. How could you stand seeing me after what I did?”

Kara’s pain tugged at Alex, settling into her chest as if it were her own. She felt an overwhelming desire to hunt down Maxwell Lord and finish him off, but it wouldn’t help. The past was done and dusted and only the future mattered. “Listen to me,” Alex said, wiping away Kara’s tears with her thumbs, “You couldn’t help what happened any more than I could. I love you. I will always love you, and we’ll figure this out. Together. We’re going to have to because…” She paused, swallowing hard. There might be a better way to break the news, but Alex didn’t think waiting would do them any favors. “Kara, there’s something you need to know.”

Kara looked up at her, clearly miserable, and Alex faltered. Reflexively, Kara reached up to comfort her, cupping her neck and pressing her palm against the bite mark she’d left, and it was better than any drug. A wave of love and support washed through Alex, nearly buckling her knees, and she had to grab on to Kara’s shoulder to steady herself.

Seeing the way Alex’s eyelids fluttered shut and the trepidation on her face melted away into contentment as she unthinkingly called upon the ability to manipulate and soothe granted her by Alex’s mating bite, Kara pulled back, abashed. “I’m sorry,” she said, clasping her hands together in her lap and looking at Alex as if pleading with her to believe. “I… Oh Rao, Alex, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“I’m pregnant,” Alex blurted out, cutting into Kara’s apologies. “That’s why I’ve been pulled out of the field.”

In an instant, Kara went pale. Stricken. Her eyes cut down to Alex’s belly and then back up, somehow impossibly even wider than they had been a moment before. “Pregnant?”

Alex nodded her confirmation.

Kara shot up, one hand instinctively going toward Alex’s belly only to pause before making contact. Her chair skidded into the wall with a dull thump and the crack of plaster but Kara didn’t even turn to look. She looked half on the verge of wrapping Alex up in a bear hug and half on the verge of flying straight through the roof and far, far away. “Oh,” she said faintly. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.” At Kara’s nervous, uncertain look, she corrected, “Completely sure. Medical did a blood test to check for possible alien infection. I guess they run the pregnancy test as a standard procedure on omegas of child-bearing age whenever they draw blood. It came back positive for hCG.” She shrugged, uncomfortable in the recounting. “So, pregnant.”

“Why were they checking for possible alien infection?” Kara’s expression shifted to horrified. “Because of me?”

Alex blushed as deeply as Kara at the implication and the memories it called forth to nibble at the edges of her mind. “No! Not because of…” She cleared her throat and sighed. “There was a little trouble with one of the cells yesterday. A Khund got loose briefly and I got a small scratch. That’s all.”

“Alex!” Kara’s eyes narrowed. Alex knew that look, both for its frustration and because the way Kara’s gaze was sweeping up and down her frame was a dead giveaway that she was using her x-ray vision. “It’s on my arm,” she said, tugging up her sleeve. “It’s no big deal.”

“There are stitches!” There was something comforting in the way Kara looked at her, concerned and chastising all at once, because it felt normal. Alex had very dearly missed normal. “Why did no one call me?”

“You were already dealing with that warehouse fire, and anyway, we haven’t exactly been close the last few weeks.”

Alex was surprised when Kara blinked back tears. “You could have been hurt,” she said, pulling Alex into an impulsive hug. Everything about it was right, from the feel of Kara’s arms around her to the way she smelled. It was like an itch being soothed and Alex surged into it unconsciously, burying her nose against Kara’s neck and breathing in deeply. Kara hugged her more tightly in response, and Alex got the same feeling she had after a good massage, loose and relaxed and calm. She’d missed this, missed her mate, missed…

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

“So I’m fine,” she said, taking a deliberate step back and clasping her hands together to hide the way they were trembling, “and we’ll be fine. We’ll talk about this or we won’t, because everything’s fine now. Everything can go back to normal. Everything’s forgiven, not that there was anything to forgive in the first place because you can’t blame yourself for what happened. You weren’t yourself, but it’s all fine now.” That was, she acknowledged silently, if you ignored the fact that there was now a baby to consider.

“Alex…”

“I have to go,” Alex said, stumbling her way backwards into the door. She opened it just enough to slip through, ignoring the unhappy look on Kara’s face. “I have a meeting. Can’t be late.”


	2. The highs and lows of real estate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The highs and lows of real estate and the kinds of conversations you should have before you go about gestating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just feel the need to note that this is all a highly self-indulgent piece of self-indulgence.

In an effort to pretend like everything was completely normal, Alex was determinedly not thinking about things. She wasn’t thinking about the way it felt to have Kara’s arms around her. She wasn’t thinking about the underlying sense of contentment that had come with simply being in the same room with her, despite the circumstances. Neither was she thinking about the frightening uncertainty that was the future, filled with trying to find some kind of balance in a relationship that had definitively shed all traces of mostly platonic mutual adoration.

No, she was focusing on the now. Alex surveyed her apartment with a critical eye. She hadn’t gotten around to it the night before, since she’d spent the parts of the evening when she wasn’t actively in shock in a stupor, but there was going to be a baby. She couldn’t even accurately predict when there would be a baby, because barring Clark’s mother, Kryptonians hadn’t gestated in centuries. When they did, at least according to the information they’d managed to download from the crystals available to the DEO, it was with a gestational cycle that exceeded that of humans. If Alex ended up pregnant for 11 and a half months, she might change her mind about not hunting down and exterminating Max Lord. Then again, this would be a half-Kryptonian baby on Earth, under the influence of the yellow sun, and there was no way to gauge how that might affect her estimated due date. Not that it was a date, really. It was more like a window, with an arbitrary deadline with plus or minus far too many weeks on either side for her to feel comfortable.

The point was, she wasn’t quite sure her apartment was the best place to raise a child. For starters, it was a one bedroom, and in that one bedroom the bed was on a raised platform that seemed absolutely perfect if you were the kind of parent unconcerned about the possibility that a child might topple off of it. She might be having a baby impervious to injury, one that would probably be in less danger than the floor should that happen, or she might be having a baby that would bruise and cry and hurt. Some part of her shuddered at the thought that these were concerns she might have had to face at 16 had her mother not made sure that wouldn’t happen with single-minded efficiency. If she hadn’t, there would be an Alex and Kara mixture that would have been almost as old now as they’d been then which was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.

Young and stupid wasn’t going to provide adequate cover this time. She didn’t even want to contemplate her mother’s reaction to the fact that it was a fate that had been delayed but not avoided. As far as she knew, her mother knew nothing about the incident, which was good in that there would be nothing good to come out of her knowing the specifics but also not quite so good in that someone (likely herself, Alex grumbled) was going to have to pony up some facts about the expanding waistline she knew would be coming. Even if she could manage to avoid her mother for the months between now and the birth of the baby – however long that may be – keeping the existence of a grandchild from her was unsustainable in the long run. Her mother would have to be told, and Alex would have to weather her disappointment and disapproval. She could lump it in with the disappointment and disapproval she’d likely find coming her way from all corners once the truth was widely known. Her life would soon be full of people who would eventually come to know that she was having a baby with her foster sister or who believed she’d whored herself out to Supergirl on request and without protection because she’d been a weak, gullible, heat-slick omega. From the bottom of a well looking up, neither seemed preferable.

The apartment was going to have to go. No, most of her _life_ was going to have to go. Forget concerns over uneven flooring. She was effectively barred from fieldwork through the rest of her pregnancy, however long that might be. Afterwards? Exactly how was she supposed to continue to be ready to roll out on a moment’s notice if there was a newborn to consider? DEO field work wasn’t exactly compatible with a schedule full of diaper changes and midnight feedings. It was probably why there were so few omegas in the field as it was. All of the time and resources invested into her training, and now she was nothing more than a glorified baby carrier.

Unless they decided there should be no baby at all.

 _Fuck_. She needed to talk to Kara, which contravened her plan to essentially ignore the fact that she probably needed to talk to Kara about all sorts of things. Kara hadn’t been in control of herself, though. She’d been compromised, incapable of making decisions. Maybe this wasn’t something she wanted, and Alex couldn’t leave that question unasked. Chances were that Kara would just go along with it if Alex made the decision to have the baby, but that wasn’t the kind of decision she wanted to make unilaterally.

It wasn’t the kind of discussion that could wait forever, but it could wait at least another day.

\------

Real estate had never been something to which Alex had devoted much time or effort. Apartments were found by prioritizing convenience, price, and features. She’d never been overly concerned with fripperies, not swayed if a building boasted a gym or a courtyard. That meant she’d mostly gone for close to work, moderately priced, and decently updated. Beyond that, she generally found herself at the mercy of her mom or Kara, who would sweep in and accessorize and make suggestions that Alex followed because interior decorating wasn’t high on her list of priorities.

Now, though, with several possible futures laid before her, most of which included a baby… Rent or buy? Apartments and condos seemed questionable with the prospect of a superpowered baby, so maybe a house? If so, in what neighborhood? Did she have to start worrying about schools? If not, when did that start? How many bedrooms? Two, at least, but should she add another so that she could have a home office? A guest bedroom?

She groaned, closing out of the online listing service. Maybe a quantity of foam would be sufficient for making sure that the baby wouldn’t be able to hurt itself too badly. She could stay in her apartment, put off any decisions about the child’s future academic career, and compensate with an ostentatious crib and industrial-level baby-proofing.

Hadn’t someone bought recently? Banerjee in Logistics? She felt certain she’d chipped in for a housewarming gift. Maybe she could get some pointers, or at least tips for finding a good realtor. It’d be easiest if she could simply lay out the parameters, have someone else who actually knew what they were doing take care of all the work, and give her maybe 3 options from which to choose.

She could imagine the conversation: _A couple of bedrooms would be great. Do they make homes out of chromium? She’d take titanium in a pinch. Really anything that seemed indestructible would do, so maybe they should steer away from brick, wood, siding, stucco… that kind of thing. Lots of natural light would be best, and blast resistant glass in the windows would be a definite plus. If it was multi-story, she’d definitely need a balcony. If they could keep out of a place with an HOA, they probably should. She couldn’t be sure, but there was a high probability of a steady incidence of property damage, at least for the next 5-10 years, and she didn’t think she could stay within the confines of CC &Rs._

Yeah.

\------

“Banerjee, hey,” Alex said, finding her quarry in the cafeteria and snagging a chair at her otherwise empty table, “I have questions. So many questions.”

The Logistics agent looked startled, possibly because Alex hadn’t joined anyone for lunch outside of Supergirl, her field team, or senior leadership since she’d joined the DEO. When Alex remembered to eat lunch at all, that was.

“Certainly, Agent Danvers. How can I help you?”

“What? Oh, no. It’s not work talk. You just bought a house, right?” Alex settled into her chair with a sigh, already pulling the plastic wrap off of the sandwich she’d purchased. She took a hefty bite and chewed with relish, which seemed to both visibly relax her lunch partner and serve as a focus of fascination.

“It was a condo actually, but yeah.”

Questions about condos led to questions about how she decided to go with a condo, which led to Alex finding out more about Banerjee’s life than she’d ever anticipated. _Call me Jhanvi_ made it into the conversation somewhere around a careful dissection of how to tell if a place was likely to fall down around your ears and/or infect you with some kind of creeping, black mold.

“So I dumped that agent when he the gall to tell me it was a cosmetic issue…” Jhanvi was saying, when without warning, she stiffened and trailed off.

“Unbelievable,” Alex said, waiting for the continuation of the story. “There should be…”

Belatedly, she noticed the way Jhanvi was looking over her shoulder, eyes wide and face frozen in nervous greeting.

“Su… Supergirl.”

The screech of a chair being pulled out seemed abnormally loud in the suddenly quite hushed cafeteria.

“Hey.” Kara plopped down beside Alex and casually threw an arm over the back of her chair in an unthinking gesture of long habit. Amused, Alex noticed Kara noticing what she’d done, and watched the silent battle of _more awkward to leave it there_ versus _more awkward to retract_. Leaving it there won with an unsure but self-reassuring nod of the head and a quick glance around the room to see if anyone was paying attention which deliberately skipped over Alex. “Don’t mind me. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Of course not,” Jhanvi said, eyes lowered. “If you have any further questions, Agent Danvers, I will be happy to help you and your mate.”

She was gone before Alex could stop her, her gait fast and jerky, leaving behind a tense silence. Alex felt her stomach drop as Banerjee disappeared, not even sure which of the many implications was most distressing. Was it the fear she’d seen in the other woman’s eyes? If so, was it the standard wariness of offending a relatively newly ‘mated’ alpha, or was that how everyone saw her now? As Supergirl’s pet, who they could maybe talk to without courting aggression just so long as they didn’t get caught, but woe unto them if they gave even the slightest appearance of not respecting the primacy of Supergirl’s claim? Why else would Banerjee have fled upon first sight of Kara, tail between her legs, from a friendly, collegial discussion? As for the relationship she’d assumed, well…

“Your… your mate? Do people… I mean…”

Alex’s gaze snapped to Kara at the bumbling question, and something about the sheepish, flushed look on her face made Alex furious. “Of course they do,” she hissed, conscious of all of the people watching them, covertly or less than. “What else would they think?” She covered her bite mark self-consciously. “It’s not like you were subtle.”

Kara flinched and Alex, despite her irritation, had to stifle the instinct to comfort. The whole thing was neither of their faults and both of their faults all at once. Alex wanted it to be as easy as acknowledging the former and ignoring the latter, but it couldn’t. Things couldn’t return to the status quo because the status quo had been permanently altered.

For a moment, they sat in miserable silence, unable to look at one another.

“I’m sorry I scared your friend away,” Kara said finally, clearly trying to find her way back to a topic that would allow them to pretend things were the way they’d always been. She pulled her arm from the back of Alex’s chair and slumped down in her seat, eyes focused mindlessly on the table top, and tried, and failed, to block the word mate from her mind.

“We were talking about the house buying process.” Alex crumpled her napkin and deposited it on her now empty plate, wishing she could dispose of her anger as easily. “She bought recently, and I thought she might have some tips.”

It took a few moments for Kara to actually register what Alex had said. “Are you going to buy a house?” The words came out in a surprised rush.

Alex shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She scanned the room, and found far too many eyes still covertly focused in their direction. “Yeah, well, if I keep the baby, I’m going to need more room.”

Kara’s hands, which had fallen to clutch nervously at the seat of her chair, involuntarily tightened. The result was an unexpected shattering of hard plastic. Kara dropped the splintered material to the floor as she staggered to her feet, aghast at the momentary loss of control. It was just – Alex said _if I keep_ and _I’m going to need more room_. Alex was making plans, and none of them seemed to include her.

In the periphery, the room reacted. Hands moved to the guns strapped around agents’ thighs. A tense, wary silence fell suddenly, all attention focused on her. Someone spoke softly into a comms device pinned to their collar. _Notify Director Henshaw that Supergirl is displaying an aggressive posture in the cafeteria._

“I’m sorry,” Kara said softly, blinking furiously to stem the rising tide of tears. She looked around the room, seeing the way the DEO staff was preparing to throw themselves headfirst into a fruitless fight against someone who had been their invincible heroine just weeks before. Before the Red K. Before she’d abducted one of their own. What was she now? A threat in their midst, never to be fully trusted ever again? “I’m sorry,” she said, loudly enough that the words traveled to the far corners of the room. She met gaze after wary gaze and was thrown back in time to when she was a newly arrived Kryptonian struggling to find her place on Earth, always on the outside. Never quite fitting in and sure she never would. Sure she’d never have a home, family, friends – just people watching over her until someone else could be found to take her off their hands. “I’m sorry,” she said again, voice cracking.

Beside her, Alex stood. “Kara,” she said softly, sadly, anger extinguished in the face of Kara’s distress. She reached out, running her hand down Kara’s arm and over her closed fist, gentle pressure coaxing her to relax.

Kara looked at her, expression hopelessly lost.

“Stand down, everybody,” Alex said, her voice assuming an air of authority. “It was just an accident. Supergirl is not your enemy.”

The room broke into an angrily buzzing, murmuring hive. Kara’s fist unclenched, and she wound her fingers around Alex’s as if the touch was a lifeline.

Alex squeezed back.

“That’s enough.” J’onn’s voice broke through the gathering tension, steady and stern. “Disperse, people. Supergirl, you’re needed in the situation room.”

“Kara…” Alex murmured.

Kara moved to pull her hand free, but Alex only held on tighter. “Let me go, Alex.” Her shoulders slumped and her chin tilted down, hair falling from behind her ears to obscure her face. “Please.”

Against her better judgment, Alex did.

\------

After the scene in the cafeteria, she hadn’t seen Kara again. She’d locked herself in her office for the rest of the day, trying and failing to forget what it had felt like to have all of her coworkers staring at her. At them. And Kara, the way she’d looked, defeated and so very, very small… Alex couldn’t let things stand as they were.

A fortifying glass of whiskey would have been nice, but she didn’t have that luxury. She pulled out her phone and opened up a new message to Kara: _Can we talk?_

Five seconds later, there was a gentle knock at her door, and Alex cursed under her breath. She hadn’t necessarily meant right that very second, because there were thoughts to put in order and decisions to make. Then again, the truth was that more time wasn’t likely to help. She would never really be ready for this.

“Come in,” she said with a sigh, not bothering to raise her voice or get up from the couch, since Kara could both hear her and use her key.

A blonde head peeked around the corner of the door. “Hey,” Kara said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She stepped inside just far enough to close the door behind her before leaning back against it, one hand tugging at her jacket. Behind her glasses, her eyes were guarded and hesitant. The fact that Kara was clearly as nervous as she was should have done more to soothe Alex than it did.

It shouldn’t have come to this. The incident in the cafeteria aside, it shouldn’t have taken a life-changing event to get them to talk about the life-changing event that had precipitated it. There was no sense laying blame on this lapse in communications – Alex could have sucked it up and forced it or Kara could have drawn upon the endless well of bravery she’d pulled from every day since she’d left an exploding Krypton in a pod. They hadn’t, and fate had forced their hands.

From her nervous perch on the edge of the couch cushion, Alex tried to look into the future. The coming conversation could send her life spiraling in any of a multitude of different directions. Each was fraught with its own complications, with implications for a relationship already strained by complications it hadn’t yet untangled. “Sit,” she said, needing Kara to stop hovering by the door. They could do this. They could have a conversation that would help determine the rest of their lives. It wouldn’t be the first difficult conversation they’d had, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Nothing that had come before had broken them. This wouldn’t either.

Kara settled onto the couch gently, unconsciously mirroring Alex’s tense posture. She bit her lip, a tell she’d never been able to hide, and looked at Alex with wide, frightened eyes.

“What happened today?”

Kara shrugged. Alex watched as her jaw ticked, locking away whatever truth Kara didn’t want to say.

“That’s how we got in this situation, Kara. By not talking. By not being honest with each other.”

“So it’s my fault?” Kara’s head whipped around so she was facing Alex. “When were you going to tell me you were thinking of buying a house?”

Alex blinked at the anger underlying Kara’s words, surprised by its vehemence. “I’ve been thinking about it for a day, maybe.” She rubbed at her forehead. “There are a lot of things I have to figure out. I haven’t even figured out all of the things I’m going to have to figure out.”

“That’s what came as a surprise.” Kara’s voice was tight. “I guess I didn’t realize I wasn’t going to be part of all of this.”

Aware that the conversation had rapidly escalated when what she’d really wanted to do was de-escalate, Alex nonetheless said, “What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”

“I just… I wasn’t hearing any we’s. And you know, maybe that’s valid. You’re the innocent one here. You’re the one who’s going to have to change everything about her life, but I hoped I’d be a part of it. If _you_ decide you’re going to keep the baby, then _you’re_ going to need somewhere else to live. Where am I in all of that? In my apartment by myself? Is that my price?”

Alex opened her mouth and closed it, caught up short by Kara’s words. “I don’t know where you are,” she said, realizing that the time for _that_ conversation had come. She gentled her tone. “Do you want this baby, Kara? It’s something we need to talk about while there’s still time.”

Kara froze. Blinked. Neglected to draw in breath.

“Want it?” she echoed weakly, eyes drifting down to Alex’s midsection before looking back up at Alex helplessly. “Do I want this baby?”

Alex shrugged. “Do you? I need to know what you want. You didn’t exactly have a choice in this either.” She reached out instinctively, laying her hand over Kara’s. “You don’t have to answer right now. There’s still time before we have to make a decision.”

Kara’s lip disappeared between her teeth once again. She looked away, up to the ceiling, and Alex saw the glint of tears on her lashes.

“Kara,” she said softly, just like she had earlier that day.

Kara swallowed hard. “That’s the problem.” She blinked rapidly, and when her eyes met Alex’s, they were wet and shining but no tears fell. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, Alex, but not like this. I wanted there to be an ‘us’. I wanted us to make this decision because it’s something we wanted. But I can’t make you do this. Not like this.”

Alex nodded, engaging only with the parts she could handle at that moment. “So that’s what you want?”

She watched as Kara crumbled right in front of her. “It doesn’t really matter what I want,” she said thickly, dashing a hand against her cheek as a tear broke free. “I didn’t let you decide what you wanted. I just took.”

“So if I wanted to keep it, you’d what? Step away? Not be involved?”

Kara’s eyes snapped to hers, confusion, fear, and anger fighting a war for dominance. “Don’t, Alex.”

“Don’t what? Tell you that you can’t make a decision by refusing to make a decision?” Alex leaned back, arms crossed over her chest. “Forget about everything else for the moment, Kara. Yes, no, or I need to think about it. Those are your options. Give me one and we’ll go from there.”

She watched as Kara’s jaw tightened and her shoulders hunched with tension. Her hands clenched and released, clenched and released, and Alex welcomed the building emotion. She had a suspicion that a swift, cleansing fire might do the situation some good. Max Lord hadn’t been seen in over a year, though he clearly had some secrets yet to spring. Kara had sublimated until she very literally couldn’t sublimate anymore, but was she really to blame for that? _This can’t happen again_ , Eliza had said to Alex that day in the clinic after she’d caught them together. _Do you really want to destroy the bond you have with your sister over this? Over sex?_ Alex – scared herself – had bought into and parroted it, and Kara had obeyed. Twice they’d been caught unawares, first by Alex’s initial heat and now by Red K. Each had been its own version of outside influence. Together, an omega experiencing her first heat and a confused and freshly presented alpha probably had about as much chance of doing something other than what they had as a Kara on Red K and an Alex overwhelmed by her call had just a few weeks before. They _needed_ this.

When Kara spoke, her voice was soft, subdued. Curiously under control. “What does it matter what I want, Alex? You’re right. These are your decisions to make.” She ducked her head and slid her hands behind her neck, hiding her face.

Alex found her need to get everything out in the open, to have done with what this had done to their lives, cut out from underneath her. She wanted cathartic fire and anger, not hopeless despair. “Of course it matters,” she said, reaching out to run her fingers through Kara’s hair. “Kara, of course it does.”

Underneath her touch, Kara shuddered. “I spent all this time convincing myself that it was okay that we weren’t together. What we had was still special. And it was, Alex. I’ve never loved anyone more than I love you. I could love you as my sister. I did love you as my sister.” She turned her head to the side, looking at Alex through the shelter of her arm. “I thought I did, but maybe I was just fooling myself. The first time with the Red K was bad enough. Waking up and remembering all the things I’d said… it was awful. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.” She blew out a breath and dropped her arm so that Alex could see her face. “Coming back to myself at the Fortress after you gave me the antidote… seeing you, remembering it all…”

She straightened and shrugged, letting Alex see the moment play over her face again.

“It’s not quite real, the moment you realize you’ve done something you can’t come back from.” Kara shook her head bitterly. “I’d like to have a choice in it sometime.”

“ _Kara_.”

“And what do we do now, Alex?” Kara plowed ahead. “I’m not stupid enough to think this is something you ever wanted. A kid, maybe, but someday. With someone you chose. Not now, and not with me, and not because you feel like you have to.” Kara reached out, her fingers ghosting against the bite on Alex’s neck. “Everything I ever wanted, and it’s poison.”

Kara’s words left Alex brittle in their wake. Kara had always had her demons. A girl from a destroyed world, abandoned by the only touchstone she had in her new life – how could she not? They were hidden, shown only in flashes to Alex and Eliza because Kara didn’t have the luxury of truth with anyone but the people who knew her best. Maybe it was why Kara’s truths cut more deeply, wrapped up and hidden away under layers of carefully cultivated normalcy as they were. Supergirl, with all her might, didn’t have the right to anger or fear. Alien girl in hiding Kara Danvers didn’t have the comfort of grief and longing.

Kara loved her. Kara wanted her. Kara wanted them to be a family in every way, and after everything that had happened, she couldn’t be bothered to try and hide it. Like this, though… Was Kara right? Was it all tainted? Alex had lived nearly half her life with Kara’s bite scarred into her back, and that had to mean something. Love sometimes faded, taking bonds and bites with them, but not for her. Not for them. Even when she’d been at her lowest, drunk and in jail and failing out of grad school and as distant from Kara as she’d ever been, the bite and its bond had persisted. She’d kept it hidden, going out of her way to keep others from seeing it, but she hadn’t actively tried to break it.

Wanting something didn’t exactly mean she wanted this, though. The baby? They’d had to have the conversation, but the truth was, she’d accepted it as fact as soon as she’d heard. She just had. If pressed, she could try to articulate reasons, but the truth was visceral and instinctive. The entity currently in embryo status that was destined to upend her life was Kara’s, and it was as simple as that.

“You’re wrong,” Alex said, her voice not as steady as she’d like as she spoke a truth that hadn’t fully set. “I do want this. This baby… I do want it.”

Kara cut her eyes at Alex, her disbelief clear.

Alex shrugged and offered a tight smile. “Maybe I wouldn’t have chosen now, but now chose us. We’ll figure it out. Together.” She held out her hand, fingers spread.

After a moment’s hesitation, Kara took it.

\------

Alex awoke with a start, sweating beneath the sheet twisted tightly around her. She was panting, uncertain, in that transition from sleep to wakefulness that made it difficult to discern dream from reality. Then again, it’d been more memory than dream, as vivid minutes before as it had been when it happened. She could still feel it, the soft brush of Kara’s hair against her inner thighs. The warmth of Kara’s tongue against her clit and the look of devotion on her face as she worked without tiring, driving Alex to climax over and over again. Stopping only when Alex begged her, abs quivering from exertion, too sensitive for more.

“Fuck,” she muttered, flipping over her pillow and burying her face in cool fabric. _Fuck_.

\------

Alex straightened, arching and squirming to work the kinks out of her back that came with peering down at specimens. The lab was quiet save for the click of typing and the hiss and hum of equipment running in the background. She let out a deep breath and winced as it made the waistband of her pants cut into the skin of her stomach. They’d fit perfectly the week before but pregnancy, as she’d learned, came with a number of unsightly things. There was the bloating and the nausea, and the way her bra seemed to rub against her in a way that was distracting, if not painful, and couldn’t be eased no matter how much adjusting she did. She’d fallen asleep hours earlier than normal three days out of the prior week, and teared up over a description of a coworker’s engagement she’d overheard in the breakroom. The day before she’d chugged through half a carton of orange juice only to gag over it that morning.

And now her pants didn’t fit.

She tugged her DEO polo free of her waistband and surreptitiously undid the button, sighing in relief at the extra room gained. It was ridiculous already, the whole pregnancy business, and she was maybe only a month along at the outside. It was as if their decision to have the baby had given her body the go-ahead to indulge in all the clichés, and the notion of 8 to 10 more months of it was enough to give her a headache on top of the ones apparently being caused by the hormones flooding through her body with gleeful indiscretion.

A paper bag landed on the desk beside her, snapping her from her trance.

“Lunch?” Kara asked, her voice still hesitant even after their accord of the week before. She’d taken to showing up with food and reminders that Alex needed to rest, at least for a few minutes, or else it would tell in her feet and lower back. It made Alex alternately grumpy and embarrassingly gooey because it wasn’t as if the proto-Danvers was any larger than a poppy seed according to the lore widely available on fully human pregnancies. She had to assume the same was true for Kryptonian hybrid ones, because she couldn’t recall Martha Kent ever sharing with her mother or father that Clark had been anything other than infant-sized upon his arrival.

It would have been nice if Clark and Lois had done her the courtesy of going through the whole baby-producing process first. She would have appreciated a guide, or at least a rough outline. Anything, really, to allay the ever present concern she had that this whole thing was going to leave her swollen and miserable into months that had to be counted in the double digits. The scientist in her was excited to be able to document the first occurrence, but the expectant mother in her was not looking forward to intensified morning sickness and late night cravings. So far she’d managed to get by with a minimum of vomiting, but she didn’t hold out hope.

Case in point: the sudden twist of her stomach as the smell of hot, greasy french fries hit her.

“Kara, take it away,” she directed, bringing her hand up to cover her mouth. “Please. Now.”

Kara’s look of concern was replaced by one of urgency in the second before she super-sped away, leaving papers fluttering behind her. The smell of fries lingered, forcing Alex to follow in her wake, veering out of the scent trail and into an uninfected office as quickly as she could. It was an empty office, thankfully. Alex wasn’t quite ready to explain why she was performing feats of spycraft merely to escape the once lovely fragrance of fried potatoes, and doing so with a look on her face indicating that she might befoul the tough, bulk-purchase government carpet beneath her feet at even the slightest provocation.

Uninhabited offices had become unexpected safe harbors. They gave her time to stare blankly at undecorated walls, letting her mind chase itself round and round the exigencies of her life. Together, they were adapting to the pregnancy thing as well as any two individuals who had not expected to jump start an embryo, but tacitly ignoring the events that had precipitated it in the first place. It was a fine balance, supported primarily by hesitant uncertainty.

Kara found her there, slumped in an uncomfortable office chair, fingers picking at the hem of her shirt.

“So,” Kara said, leaning her hip against the desk, “no more fries.”

Alex waved a hand. “Who knows? They could be all I want to eat tomorrow.” She heaved a sigh and straightened, trying to wind herself back into the appropriate shape for a person. Opposite her, Kara’s arms were crossed over her chest and her back rounded. Her eyes settled on Alex for a long moment before flitting away to bounce between the ceiling, the carpet, the door, and her own boots.

“Kara…”

Kara straightened, her eye line managing to miss Alex’s, skimming over her shoulder instead. “What about salad? I can get the one from that place that gives you the crispy bread.”

She tried again. “Kara, we need to…”

“I’ll leave it on your desk. Winn said he had something he wanted to show me, so…”

Alex tried to catch her but Kara was a blur.

\------

She’s comforted by the pressure of Kara’s body stretched out on top of her. There’s more to the Fortress than she’d realized, including an actual bed in an actual climate-controlled room full of actual Kryptonian artifacts. The mattress is soft beneath her, creating delicious contrast to Kara’s weight and the snug swell of her knot stretching Alex in a way that has become disarmingly familiar. She stretches and arches, laughing as Kara makes a noise of displeasure and wraps her arms around her, rolling them over so that Alex is draped over her.

“I should keep you here.” Kara runs the tip of her forefinger down the slope of Alex’s nose. “There’s nowhere for you to run.”

Her eyes are hypnotic, or so they seem to Alex. They watch her with the unwavering intensity of something fierce – a cobra, maybe, pondering whether or not to strike.

“Everyone leaves,” Kara continues, her fingers now sifting through Alex’s hair. “You left, and when I found you again, you lied.” Her brow furrows, smooths. “I don’t know how I didn’t know. I guess I thought you wouldn’t do that, not to me.”

Somewhere, vaguely, she understands the words, but they don’t make sense. Lie? Why would she lie to Kara? Leave her? Never. She stretches, finding Kara’s neck with her teeth and biting down hard. Like every time she’s tried before, the skin gives but doesn’t break. Was that why Kara keeps their bond from being completed? The supposed lies? The accusations of abandonment?

 _Why_ , she asks, driven to tears of frustration at the denial.

“I can’t break.” Kara strokes the mark she’d left on Alex and kisses her softly. “Not even for you.”

\------

The signs were quite evident – Kara was planning something. She’d invited Alex over to her apartment with a disturbing lack of nonchalance, had flown to multiple cities to assemble a menu of all of Alex’s favorite things, and had clearly engaged in a bout of professional-level housecleaning. Her button-up was so crisp it had probably just been brought home from the dry cleaners, and she was wearing her tightest pair of jeans, which Alex had tried in vain to ignore.

“This is nice,” Alex said stiltedly, because Kara kept sneaking worried glances at her. Then again, it was the first time they’d truly been alone since they’d decided to have a baby together without Alex actively acknowledging the fact that Kara had essentially professed her love, so perhaps some awkwardness was to be expected.

Kara nodded. Alex nodded. Kara ate. Alex ate.

The tension built, and Alex wasn’t quite sure how they were going to extract themselves from it, when Kara said in a rush, “I think you should move in. Here. Move in here. With me. You and the baby, but just you for right now. The baby will come later, obviously. Like a pre-order.”

Alex choked on a half-chewed bite of food.

“Hear me out. You have a one bedroom. That’s why you’re looking, right? This place is huge, Alex. We can make it into whatever we need it to be. We’ll divide the loft into two bedrooms. You can have whichever one you want and I’ll take the other one. When the baby comes, we’ll get the best crib ever and we’ll make a space. There won’t be any rush and there won’t be any pressure. If it doesn’t work out, we can take our time finding somewhere that fits all of us.”

Alex had to forcibly stifle the visceral, immediate _yes_ that bubbled up her throat. Kara was offering her home, family, and mate, and she yearned for it. Suddenly and unexpectedly yearned for it, caught off-guard by the intensity of the feeling. She lived a lifetime in the span of seconds, seeing the years unfurl like the flutter of pages in a book. Kara by her side. The two of them twined together, Kara’s hand resting protectively on the curve of her swollen belly. Looking down to see a baby with silky blonde hair, big blue eyes, and the barely there echo of the cleft in Alex’s chin. The first day of school, packing lunch and double-checking a tiny backpack and tinier shoelaces to make sure everything was in place. Kara cooking dinner and laughing as Alex tried to rewind years and years of math and science knowledge to a place where she can explain things to a second grader at their level.

“Kara,” she said, throat tight, because she wasn’t ready for that. She just… she just wasn’t.

Desperation flickered across Kara’s face. “I’ve been reading up, Alex. I can help with so many things. And they say it’s better… I mean, they say it’s easier on you if I’m here and you can know you’re safe and protected.”

Alex slowly lowered her fork to her plate, hyperstimulated and overwhelmed and capable of processing only the things she heard and not the things she felt. “I see,” she said faintly, pushing her chair back so she could stand. “This is some pop psychology alpha nonsense. Maybe I should start wearing your clothes, too, so all of the other big, bad alphas know I’ve already been claimed and bred.”

She was being too harsh. She knew, yet somehow couldn’t stop, even at the sight of Kara’s visible distress. “No, Alex. That’s not it. I swear. Can’t I just want to share this with you? I’m never going to have this again.”

She could feel Kara’s desolation, and it hurt. It was a literal, clawing pain, wrapped around her heart and squeezing tight.

“I have to go,” she said, pawing uselessly at her chest. She was already collecting her things, halfway out the door, and desperate to take just one unimpeded breath. “I can’t think about this right now, Kara. I’m sorry. We’ll do this together, I promise, but… I can’t. Now not.”

She looked behind her one last time, seeing everything Kara had laid before her, and closed the door.


	3. a minor mecha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eliza is told and I try to write an action scene.

Even knowing it might open up a can of worms she wasn’t yet ready to confront, Alex called her mom.

“Alex,” Eliza said, clearly delighted to hear from her daughter.

Alex rubbed at the phantom pain she could still feel like an aching void in her chest and stumbled straight into the heart of her problem. “Mom, I… You and Dad… What was it like after you and Dad shared bites? Could you feel him? Feel what he was feeling?”

There was a moment of silence before Eliza ventured, “Alex, honey, is there something I need to know?”

“No, I’m just curious. That’s all.”

On the other side of the phone, her mother sighed and shifted, clearly not convinced but not, Alex hoped, going to press. “Yes and no. There was a connection almost immediately. I was always aware of him on some level. Always conscious of his presence. Over time, the connection grew. It strengthened over the years as we shared things together.” She paused, chuckled. “And then we had you, and it was quite the signal boost – at least for a while. I think your father may have experienced it even more keenly than I did, but I don’t like to speculate. You know how much junk science there is around omegas.”

Alex groaned – audibly, apparently, from the way her mother again prodded, “Alex? Did you… meet someone?”

She was going to have to tell her mother sooner or later, and Alex decided, possibly in a moment of insanity, that sooner might as well mean now. “There was an incident,” she said with careful understatement. “Someone infected Kara with Red K again.”

Eliza knew nearly as much about Red K as Alex, now that they knew it existed. Hell, she might even know as much as Maxwell Lord. She’d requisitioned a sample after the first incident, and had sent Alex notes that had been instrumental in synthesizing the new antidote formulation.

“Oh, Alex,” she said, her voice catching.

“And anyway, Kara was in rut and then I was in heat and things just kind of happened.” Alex took a deep, shaky breath, the emotional onslaught of earlier having left her on edge. “It was one of those things, you know. An accident. No one’s fault. But… she bit me and I’m pregnant, so…”

Alex swallowed hard at Eliza’s soft noise of concern and alarm.

“I’m coming down there,” Eliza said decisively.

“ _Mom_ , _no_.”

“Alex, I’ve had more than a decade to think about what might happen should Kara find someone she wanted to start a family with. Are you telling me that your doctors are better equipped than I am to advise on a half-Kryptonian pregnancy?”

Alex could begrudgingly admit it was a valid point.

“I’m not going to hover, if that’s what you’re afraid of, but I want to make sure you’re safe. And if this isn’t something the two of you want, we’ll figure that out too.”

“I’m… we’re keeping it.”

Eliza sighed again. “Oh, honey. I know the two of you…” She paused, and Alex could almost picture her mother trying to find a way to ask the question as delicately as possible. “I know that you and Kara have a history. Were you at least…”

“It was… We hadn’t…” Alex gave up trying to find the words to answer the question her mom couldn’t figure out how to ask. “No. We weren’t – aren’t – together.”

“But still connected, I presume.”

Alex shrugged, blinking back sudden tears. She felt the remembered frustration of skin that refused to part under the pressure of her teeth, time after time after time. “I don’t know about Kara. It’s not exactly possible to complete the bite with her. Bullet-proof skin, you know.”

She pretended to ignore Eliza’s hum of sympathy.

\------

When Eliza had said she’d come down to National City, Alex hadn’t really expected that to mean immediately. It was why she greeted her mother with gun in hand, wiping sleep from her eyes and convinced that it couldn’t literally be 4 o’clock in the morning, because that would be insane.

“I know, I know,” Eliza said, forestalling Alex’s protests even as she pulled her into a hug. “I didn’t see the point in waiting, and it’s an easier drive at night, anyway.”

Not quite fully awake, Alex did little more than stare at her mother in confusion.

“Well—” Eliza said, looking Alex over and instantly finding the nearly healed bite— “I see Kara wasn’t really concerned about discretion when she left that behind.”

“She wasn’t really concerned about anything,” Alex mumbled, the ability for rational thought still hours in the future. “Neither of us were. Mom, I don’t… Are you planning on sleeping here?”

“I’ll figure out my accommodations later. Go back to bed. I’m going to wind down from the drive and make some breakfast. We’ll talk about next steps when you wake up.”

Alex wanted to protest. It was far too much to take in nearly 90 minutes before her usual wake time, but she was far too tired. She wasn’t sure if it was a side effect of the emotional drain of the day before or a side effect of being knocked up, this inability to do anything other than watch as her mother flitted around, making herself at home. After a minute, she gave up and trudged back to bed, hopeful this would all make more sense at a reasonable hour.

\------

Kara stopped in her tracks when she entered the DEO to find Eliza chatting amiably with J’onn.

“Ah, yeah, head’s up,” Winn said, giving her a supportive pat on the shoulder as he walked by with a stack of papers in hand. “Your foster mom’s here.”

She had to find Alex. She had to warn her. Eliza was at the DEO, and that couldn’t augur anything good.

Unfortunately, J’onn waved her over before she could make her move. “Supergirl. Join us.”

Kara swallowed hard and began the slow yet interminable march of doom over to where J’onn and Eliza were waiting.

“It’s good to see you,” Eliza said, refraining from a hug for the sake of their public cover. “We have so much to talk about. I understand there have been many new and exciting developments in the last few months.”

It was, Kara realized, the worst case scenario. Somehow, Eliza already knew.

Eliza grinned at her and Kara’s heart stuttered to a panicked halt. “Let’s join Alex in the lab.”

\------

Kara tensed, expecting the bombardment to commence as soon as they were in private. She’d messed up. She’d messed up so badly that Eliza had been summoned, apparently at Alex’s behest, which was a level of bad she couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

“Calm down,” Alex said, as soon as the door to the otherwise unoccupied lab space closed behind them. “She’s here to help.”

Even with that said, Kara still turned to face Eliza, posture submissive. “I’m sorry,” she said, tugging nervously at her uniform. “It’s all my fault. Everything, all of it. It was me.”

She tensed as Eliza approached only to melt against her as she was pulled her into a hug. “Alex explained everything,” Eliza said, hands tangling in Kara’s cape as she tried to comfort her. “What happened doesn’t matter right now as much as how it happened, and what we’re going to do moving forward to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Alex looked vaguely queasy. “Enough. We have a lot to cover.”

When Kara showed no signs of loosening the hug, Eliza held out a hand to Alex in entreaty.

“I’m going to get some juice,” Alex muttered, unable to take the current of emotions flowing into her unchecked.

As soon as she was gone, Eliza tugged out of Kara’s grip. “It’s going to be okay,” she said, dipping her head to try and meet Kara’s eyes.

At the flood of maternal warmth, Kara crumpled. “How can it be?” she asked, voice watery. “Stupid me on stupid red kryptonite broke everything. Alex isn’t in love with me. After this, she never will be, and I can’t blame her. She didn’t want this, but because of me, now she has to deal with it.”

“Did she say that?” Eliza asked gently.

“I asked her to move in with me and she said no. I practically confessed my love to her, but why should that matter when I ruined her life? I embarrassed her in front of her coworkers. I used her nature against her. I kidnapped her and got her pregnant and now everyone’s just waiting for me to snap again and Alex can’t even stand to be in the same room with me.”

Eliza worked to keep the surprise off of her face. She’d suspected that Alex hadn’t told her everything, but from the hints she’d just been given, that was an understatement. There had been no mention of kidnapping, for one very startling example.

“First things first, then,” she said, reverting to her crisis footing as problem-solver. “We take as many worries off your list as we can.”

\------

“Do you really think it will work?” Kara asked, eyes darting nervously between Eliza and Alex.

Eliza stepped in, seeing that Alex was on the verge of snapping, unable to take her own anxiety with Kara’s heaped on top of it. “Eventually. Hopefully. I’d like to try the deflector first before we experiment with desensitization. J’onn has agreed to let me use the lab as a visiting scientist. With the equipment you have here, it will be much easier to identify the exact radioactive signature expressed by red kryptonite and work out the wavelength we’ll need to use to block its effects. I understand Alex has been working with Mr. Schott to reverse engineer the devices the other Kryptonians used to protect themselves against kryptonite.”

It was clearly news to Kara, who looked at Alex with surprise. “We’ve been working on building our own tech,” she said, as if it was no big deal. “Winn thinks we can weave it into the fabric of your suit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close.”

“And since her work is curtailed for the time being, I’m going to take over.”

Kara’s eyes snapped up, and she looked at Alex with alarm. “Curtailed? Alex…”

“It’s not you,” Alex interrupted sharply, pushing back at the incipient wave of not-her-panic. “I can’t work with Krypton-based radioactive substances now, that’s all. Even with full protective gear, it’s too risky.”

Eliza nodded. “There’s no sense in waiting until she can get back to the lab, not for something this important.” At a warning look from Alex, she added, “Though I will, of course, being sharing all of my data and observations with her and she will remain a key member of the team.”

It had been a very busy morning, Kara realized.

“Speaking of data and observations, I need blood from both of you.”

Alex sighed tiredly. “ _Mom_.”

“What?” Eliza protested, and Kara realized this had also been an ongoing battle. “They’re going to run a full panel on you when you finally get around to having an actual prenatal care visit. There’s nothing wrong with me doing it now, and maybe doing a little sequencing while I’m at it. We’ll stick the test results in your medical record and I’ll keep the rest securely encrypted. When the little one gets here, we’ll be able to compare. In the meantime, we have to get you set up with a doctor.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “I’m not letting one of your friends give me a pelvic.”

“You know that Sandra is one of the most widely respected obstetricians in the state. 

“Yeah, and I also know the two of you used to have wine dates together.”

“Then go to your regular GYN. Until and unless we know this is anything other than a standard pregnancy, there’s no need to bring in a specialist. At least, not yet.”

“I will! I’ll make an appointment, alright?”

Kara observed the glint in Eliza’s eyes with dismay. “For a time when both you and Kara can go.”

“Oh, my god,” Alex said, a hand covering her eyes.

“I’d prefer we did it all in-house, but J’onn tells me the medbay staff are mostly internists.”

Alex braced herself against the counter tiredly and averted her eyes to the ceiling, as if looking for the intercession of a benevolent deity. “This was such a bad idea.”

Eliza took pity on her, leaning over to place a kiss on Alex’s temple. “J’onn tells me he has a guest room. I’m going to be staying with him for a little while. I’m glad you called me.”

Kara watched in surprise as Alex let herself be comforted. She leaned into Eliza for a steady ten count before straightening with a sigh, moment of weakness over.

\------

It felt painfully, wonderfully domestic to be sitting in the waiting room beside Alex, waiting for her name to be called. She hadn’t been sure that Alex would take Eliza’s advice, much less that she’d provide Kara with the date, time, and location for her first prenatal care visit. Although things had smoothed out into a stable rhythm and Alex seemed to be tolerating both the changes in her work life and Kara’s increased presence in her life, she was also harder to manage. Not that Kara would ever dare to tell Alex she did anything like managing her, because Kara didn’t have a death wish.

“Stop it,” Alex said, placing a hand on Kara’s knee to stop its bouncing. “You’re making me nervous.”

Which was another thing. She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop – she promised she hadn’t – but Eliza and J’onn were always talking these days. It was a little weird, because it was _Eliza_ and _J’onn_ , each of whom was supposed to occupy a space in her life that wasn’t the same space. They most certainly weren’t supposed to be occupying the same space and talking about her, but they were.

She was pretty sure Alex would freak out if she knew.

Then again, Alex would freak out if she freaked out, because apparently that’s what Alex did these days. Or, more specifically, that’s what Kara had done to her. She’d opened a one-way channel pumping everything she was feeling directly toward Alex at high volume, and from what Eliza had told J’onn, it was driving Alex crazy. J’onn had been very zen about it, talking about the need for balance and harmony, but the gist seemed to be that the only way to keep Alex from being as guarded as an angry, feral cat when in her presence was to take that one-way channel and make it bidirectional.

Only, that wasn’t really possible. Otherwise, Kara would have returned from the Fortress proudly bearing Alex’s bite. It was frustrating enough on its own but even worse, she realized, when out amongst the unknowing. It’s not like the receptionist who’d signed them in had seen an alien with impenetrable skin standing alongside Alex as she’d handed over insurance documents and Kara had fumbled to offer up her credit card to cover the copay before Alex’s glare led to her sheepishly tucking it away again. She had seen a marked and pregnant omega there with a very clearly unmarked alpha, though, and the look she’d given Kara had been decidedly cool. And not that her ego hadn’t already taken a beating, but now she had to deal with people thinking she was a ne’er do well, commitment-phobe alpha blithely ruining omega’s lives.

Then again, maybe the receptionist hadn’t been wrong about all of it.

“Danvers,” a nurse in pastel pink scrubs called, and Kara followed Alex back to an examination room.

It turned out that Alex’s regular gynecologist was disarmingly pretty. Far too pretty to be probing Alex’s vagina like it was no big deal, Kara wanted to protest, but a warning look from Alex cut her short.

“I see you’ve already had bloodwork,” the doctor said, checking her tablet, exam finished and Alex redressed. “Everything came back okay. I’ll let you know if we see anything abnormal with the Pap, but otherwise, I don’t see anything that would make me worry. You’re already on prenatal vitamins, right? Of course you are. Stop by the desk on your way out and we’ll get you scheduled to come back next month. We should be able to do the ultrasound then.” She glanced up, including Kara this time. “There’s nothing troubling in your family histories, but we’ll keep an eye on things. I know you’re pretty active, Alex, but you’ll want to switch to low and moderate intensity exercise for the duration.”

Kara tried to ignore her spike of irritation at the overly familiar _Alex_.

“Frankly, I’m surprised to see you in here for a prenatal care visit,” the doctor said, dropping her tablet to her lap and smiling at Alex in a way that Kara was pretty sure she didn’t care for. “If I’d known you were thinking about becoming pregnant, we could have worked up a pre-conception care plan.”

A blush settled along Alex’s cheekbones. “Let’s just say it was more of an accident.”

The doctor’s eyebrow rose. She took in Kara, eyes assessing, before tilting her head in acknowledgement. “I’m glad to see you’re going to be involved,” she said, giving Kara a brief, possibly perfunctory smile.

Feeling the frustrated anger rising through Kara, Alex reached out and took her hand, not even aware she’d done so until she felt Kara return her comforting squeeze. “Yep, very involved. Yes.” Seeing the doctor’s eyebrow continue to rise, Alex revised, “Involved to an appropriate, non-coercive degree.”

She stood quickly, wanting to leave before they did something that might lead to a salacious round of office gossip, and gave Kara’s hand a tug. “Come on,” she said, grateful that Kara seemed disinclined to wade into the fray despite the wariness, impotent frustration, and jealousy she was apparently feeling. “Let’s set up the next appointment and grab some lunch.”

Kara beamed at the invitation. She looked even happier than her usual default setting of exuberantly happy, and Alex realized it was probably because Kara hadn’t looked particularly happy for a long time. Pre-Red K, certainly, but the low- and sometimes high-level distress Kara had been feeling had become endemic, so much so that Alex couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Kara without the pinch of worry nagging at her features. She missed happy Kara. She missed being able to enjoy pizza and ice cream on the couch while Kara talked her way through whatever tv show they were supposed to be watching.

She missed a lot of things.

The fix was at her fingertips, or at least it seemed that way. Kara had made herself quite clear; the fact that Alex hadn’t done the same was a wedge between them, a constant irritant insidiously chipping away.

Her reasons were many and of various shades of veracity. Part of her was ashamed. She’d very publicly submitted to Kara’s call, had taken her bite, and was carrying her child. It was perhaps the most cliché of clichés, and it was galling. It was so cliché it felt performative, as if she’d read a clickbait article called ‘ _How to be the Most Omega of Omegas!_ ’ and taken it to heart as a guide. Part of it was stubborn pride. It was frustrating, but she’d weather the way people she’d known and worked with for years looked at her as if something fundamental about her had changed. She’d even weather the erosion of long-held beliefs she’d had about herself. But giving up the one last piece of independence she had? She just wasn’t ready. She loved Kara. She did. She’d fallen in love with her without meaning to when she’d been an awkward and gawky teenager trying to learn how to fit in on Earth. She’d continued to love her, simmering and hidden away, through years of separation, obfuscation, and lies. She’d shaped her life around helping Kara, protecting Kara, being the person that carried her secrets and tempered her fears.

For completely selfish reasons, she’d wanted a little while longer. She’d wanted to be sure she wouldn’t lose herself completely, subsumed under the bright shining star that was Kara. To love Kara on her own terms, in spite of the assumption it was a foregone conclusion.

But now, Alex watched and didn’t like what she saw.

Kara strode through the halls of the DEO with her shoulders back and a smile on her face, but it was a tense smile. It looked just a bit unnatural, and drew out her dimples in a way that betrayed the underlying frown. She kept a careful distance from everyone she passed, or else they kept a careful distance from her. Winn seemed the least impacted by the incident, rambling on blithely as he matched Kara’s pace, but Alex saw the stiffness in the rest of her colleagues. Supergirl had always been a little frightening, for all of her charm and bumbling graciousness. She was destruction hidden away in a non-threatening package, and there was something inherently unsettling about that. Time spent in her presence could make people forget, but DEO agents weren’t picked for their ability to overlook the dangers that lay hidden within alien bodies, whether they looked like the girl-next-door or not.

It pained her to see Kara like she’d been all those years ago, trying hard to fit in with humanity but somehow always just a little removed from it. When she thought she was alone, she dropped the uncomfortable smile. Her shoulders sagged and the suit seemed somehow too heavy for her. Sometimes she let things slip completely. She answered calls for assistance with a perfunctory grit and ignored the occasional agent pretending to ignore her, and Alex wanted to scream at them. Look what she does for you, for all of us, she wanted to say, because nothing compelled Kara to be humanity’s champion other than Kara herself. She could fade away if she wanted, all of that power hidden and essentially inert. She could ignore cries for help, and not have to live with the memory of those who’d been beyond it.

So, no. Alex didn’t like the way Kara’s brow would furrow, or the way she’d chew nervously at her lip. She didn’t like the way Kara drew back from moments of joy, letting herself have them in increments battened down by the resurgence of her worries, perceived failings, and disappointments. She missed the way Kara would walk as if each step took a conscious reminder to reconnect herself with the ground. She missed the ease between them, when every touch and every word didn’t have to be weighed and evaluated.

She resolved to fix it, and then all hell broke loose.

\------

Alex watched with interest as her mother seemed to ignore the remaining half of her sandwich. They were locked away in Alex’s office, the morning spent going over the preliminary readings and observations on Eliza’s work with Red K. Alex had been betrayed by a growling stomach, and Eliza had volunteered to grab lunch from the cafeteria while Alex finished looking over a few calculations. It had all seemed like a collegial and chummy morning until Eliza returned with two sandwiches and nothing else. Granted, it was early going and she wasn’t even close to showing yet, but Alex was hungry. Her hunger exceeded a few slices of ham and a piece of cheese between slices of bread, and she expected her mom to know that.

Finally, after 10 minutes of looking at the seemingly abandoned triangle of her mom’s own ham and cheese, Alex cracked. “Are you going to eat that?”

“Hmm? No.”

Alex didn’t bother with asking if she could have it.

Eliza put down the tablet she’d been perusing to watch Alex with wry amusement. “Well, this is a change. Your sister…” She pinched the bridge of her nose and took in a deep breath, trying to reset the conversation. “That is, Kara is usually the one with the bottomless pit of a stomach.”

The silence that followed was decidedly uncomfortable.

“You know,” Alex said, picking nervously at the crust on the remaining quarter of her purloined sandwich, “you took this a lot better than I thought you would. All of it – Kara and the baby.”

Eliza took in the body language – small, a cocoon ready to draw tight and deflect – and the way Alex looked up nervously only to look back down even more quickly. She saw fear, anticipatory sorrow, and not a little shame. “I’m sorry,” she said, needing that to be heard even if nothing else was. “That day, when I found the two of you… Your father would have known what to do, but your father was gone.” She shrugged helplessly. “One of the hardest things about grief is that your world stops but everyone else’s keeps going. I lost my balance. I was working all of the time when I should have been spending more time at home, with you. I had gotten so wrapped up in finding ways to hide from my grief and this belief that you were already so strong and smart and didn’t need me as much, and I was wrong.”

She chuckled dryly. “Coming home to find you and Kara like that… Well, it was a shock. I don’t think that’s news to you. I certainly wasn’t ready to be a grandmother. But, Alex, I know now how much pressure I put on you to be there for Kara. To watch over Kara. To take care of Kara. When I saw you, I wasn’t thinking about my strong, smart, capable daughter. I was thinking about my _omega_ daughter, and worrying she’d lose the parts of herself that were still her own. It wasn’t very charitable to either of you, but I can’t tell you how many promising omegas I’ve seen abandon everything beyond parenting and shoring up the household with uncompensated, unappreciated labor. Some of them are perfectly content with that, and I’m happy they’ve found a life that makes them happy, but you wouldn’t have been. All I could think about was you getting swallowed up. Lost. You were so young, and at that age, all it takes is one little bump to change the trajectory of your entire life. I wanted to protect you.”

Alex was looking at her, eyes wide and a little damp, and Eliza reached out, laying her hand over her daughter’s. “I think, instead, I made you feel ashamed. And now, with everything’s that happened, I wonder what might have been if I hadn’t made you feel that way. You were teenagers. Maybe you would have grown out of it, but you would have done that on your own terms and in your own way. Maybe you wouldn’t have. Maybe I stole all of those years from you. Maybe Kara wouldn’t be guilt-ridden and heartbroken if only I’d handled things differently. Maybe you wouldn’t be still ashamed.”

The sudden and unexpected removal of all that weight left Alex dizzy.

“Mom,” she began, not sure if her next words were going to be benediction or disbelief, when the door to her office slammed open.

“It’s Kara,” Winn said, frantic and panting. “She’s in trouble.”

\------

The emergency klaxon started its ominous, deliberately grating reminder that something was going very, very wrong before Alex was even halfway to the situation room. She passed by a team, suited up and headed for their vehicles, and wished that she was with them. Her first instinct, as always, was to throw herself headfirst into whatever threat Kara was facing, and it was only the nagging, unwanted knowledge that she might actually be a deadly distraction that kept her from doing so.

“Director,” she said, breathless, as she bounded up onto the platform facing the large monitors showing the situation from multiple vantage points and helmet cams. “What’s going on?”

J’onn had his arms crossed over his chest and feet spread, eyes glued to the situation unfolding on the monitors with an intensity that suggested he was seconds away from launching himself through the screen and into the fight. “It was a standard call. A fire in an abandoned warehouse, but the blaze wouldn’t die down. There was some concern that there were chemicals involved, possibly, or that maybe it was an unauthorized dump site for industrial waste, and Kara decided to help. She had it in hand when these things appeared.”

He gestured to the monitor bank, where Alex could see a pair of unidentified black blurs. As she watched, they took repeated passes at Kara, who was hovering in the air above the smoking ruins of the warehouse in a defensive, fighting posture, diverting her attention between batting them away and snuffing out the last of the flames. The pair worked in tandem, attacking from different sides in a succession so quick even Kara had trouble defending herself. It was impossible for the human eye to latch onto details, but Alex watched as Kara fought off blow after blow, growing visibly frustrated at having to cycle between defense and rescue, as the things attacking her just kept coming. In the periphery, field teams were spilling out of vehicles, weapons out and at the ready, but there was no clear plan of action.

On the next pass, Alex saw a flash of tell-tale glowing green, and saw Kara reel back as she took another pair of hits.

“J’onn,” she said urgently, watching as the unknown aggressors began to circle around Kara in tighter and tighter circles. They dove in for hits and nips like ruthless birds of prey, leaving behind cuts that didn’t immediately heal. “ _Kryptonite_.”

Beside her, J’onn shifted to his true form without a second’s hesitation. “Acting Director Danvers, you have control,” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear and reinforced with a stern look around, before disappearing from sight.

Alex stepped into his place without hesitation.

“I need medical en route to Supergirl’s location,” she called out, adrenaline keeping the worry from her voice. “Send specimen recovery teams. Have them stage two blocks west of the danger zone. Whatever that is, I want it contained safely and back here ASAP. Prep a medbay for receipt of an injured Kryptonian, and have Supergirl’s solar recovery beds activated and at full power. I want Team Charlie clearing out the rest of the fire fighters and Team Victor pushing the perimeter back another block. Comms, find out why we’ve lost audio contact with Supergirl.”

“We’re being jammed,” someone said, not looking away from the information scrolling down the screen in front of them. “It’s not clear if the unknown entity is causing it or if the location is compromised.”

On screen, Kara was flung through a nearby brick wall, leaving behind a hole big enough to drive a bus through and Alex had to clamp down on a visible show of concern. The two unknown objects, previously blurs, came to hover outside the hole, as if assessing the danger before following Supergirl in for the kill. They looked oddly skeletal – all sharp angles that feathered off raggedly, like a particularly aggressive triangle. It was impossible to tell if they were organic or mechanical, though the bright lines of kryptonite gleaming along each razor sharp edge seemed to suggest that these things had been manufactured to defeat one type of being in particular – Kryptonians.

As if they’d received authorization, the things on the screen disappeared into the building after Supergirl, and Alex took a sympathetic step after them.

“We need eyes in there,” she muttered to herself, balancing the safety of her agents with her need to know that Kara was alright.

Before she could work through the calculations and justify it to herself, J’onn’s suit camera settled into focus as he landed inside the building. The footage was grainy and murky, everything cast in shadows by the sparse light making it into the space through dirt-caked windows and a rusting, corrugated aluminum roof. She asked for a mic check and received a negative, Comms reporting that it was dead or impaired. It was somehow worse, watching in silence. She finally found Kara, cradling one arm but on her feet. Her heat vision was at full bore and one of the things was down, nearly cut in half. A blink of an eye later and Kara was gone, driven off her feet and into a support beam by the remaining aggressor. J’onn’s camera jostled as he closed the space between himself and Kara; Alex saw the tinge of black coming from the edge of the camera’s view, moving so fast it arrived at nearly the same time as its shadow.

J’onn intercepted, and for a long moment, everything was black.

“Tell Delta to close in,” she said, her voice oddly distant. “Alert medical that we may have another injured.”

On a bank of screens, footage jumped in time with footsteps as the third team on-site streamed into the abandoned building. A door was thrown open, sending a shaft of light into the wide, empty space, and Alex searched frantically for any signs of life. One of the things was laying inert, split into pieces by Kara’s heat vision to expose smoking, mechanical innards, but there was no J’onn. No Kara.

“Command, this is Delta.” The team leader’s voice crackled over the intercoms, patchy and full of static. “We can hear fighting but do not have a visual. Instructing team members to fan out and… cannot pinpoint… appears to be in the… shit, we’re gonna need…”

Alex forced her arms to stay crossed over her chest, anxiety building with each burst of barely understandable chatter.

When they finally found them, it was in time to see Kara’s heat vision falter before she collapsed. Seconds later, more views filled the screen as agents converged on the scene. J’onn was kneeling next to a seemingly unresponsive Kara, the remaining mech mostly slag behind them. Alex watched as the team rushed to their position, weapons at the ready as they encircled them in a protective shield. J’onn’s camera blinked back on, apparently damaged in the fight, and she saw Kara’s face in the pixelated, blinking mess of the feed. Her eyes were open and she was trying to talk, trying to push up on her hands, but the pain of each movement flickered across her face.

“Get someone to get the all clear from Delta and get medical in there,” Alex growled, watching as Kara’s head dropped down onto the debris-strewn concrete. The left shoulder of her uniform was torn away completely, the reinforced material at her neckline the only thing keeping it from falling off. Beneath, a long, angry gash had at some point been bleeding freely. “I want a full escort back. We have no idea what those things are or if there are more of them.”

Instructions conveyed, Alex lost herself to the buzz and hum of activity. She was consulted occasionally, and responded to the minutia that followed any sort of calamity without second guessing herself. The agents around her knew what they were doing, even if they occasionally felt the need to double check. Her attention split between the specimen recovery team working quickly but meticulously to load the massive mechanical beasts into a hastily summoned tractor-trailer and the medical crew crouched over Kara, doing their best to keep her patched until the full extent of the damage could be surveyed.

At some point, J’onn reappeared, a hulking, solid presence standing alongside her. There was a debrief, she was sure. Leadership changed hands once again.

“Alex,” Eliza said, a hand at her daughter’s elbow, “why don’t we go wait in your office?”

Alex blinked, trying to bring everything back into focus. “No,” she said, voice hoarse. “The medbay.”

She could see her mother was on the verge of arguing when J’onn stepped in, and left them both behind to figure it out.


	4. Afterglow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After one fall and before another.

After the panicked shouts, after the detritus of emergency – bloody gauze, abandoned latex gloves, and deflated IV bags – and after Kara reappeared from her first round of solar recovery, Alex let herself into the room where Kara lay, pale against stark white sheets. Dark lines were traced under eyes that, thankfully, weren’t swollen shut. The long, ugly gash on her shoulder had managed to mostly heal itself before she’d solar flared completely, but it was an angry, irritated red, the skin swollen and tender. It curled up like the tail of a scorpion over the edge of the loose neckline of her gown. Even without seeing what was underneath it, Alex knew Kara’s body was littered with bruises and scrapes, some nearly healed and some still raw.

For the first time in weeks, the only thing Alex felt was herself. There were no emotions crowding in on her own. Just the hollow emptiness of her own shock and regret, tinged with fear and anger. She didn’t like to deal in what ifs, but they shoved themselves at her mercilessly. What if there was something that could take Kara from her? What if that something would have managed to do so earlier that day, before Alex had the chance to…

To what?

“Hey,” Alex said softly, seeing Kara’s eyelids flutter. She took a quick step forward when Kara tensed, eyes darting frantically about the room as if still trying to identify threats. “It’s over. You’re okay. I promise. Nothing can hurt you here.”

The tension left Kara’s shoulders and neck at Alex’s soothing tone. She settled, finding Alex and blinking her into focus. “What happened?”

Alex wished she knew. “We’re not sure yet. You were attacked. The remains of whatever it was are down in the lab. We’ll find out, Kara. We’ll find out and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“I couldn’t…” Kara moved to sit up and winced when it pulled on tender skin. “They kept coming. They were fast, but I should have been able to stop them.” Her eyes widened with confusion. “It hurt when they hit.”

“Yeah.” Alex’s lips tightened. Kara was creeping back into her around the edges, uncertainty and fear. “Whoever made them had access to kryptonite.”

Kara dug her head into her pillow with a huff. “Why do people keep doing that to me?”

Instead of answering, Alex brushed Kara’s hair off of her forehead with a gentle touch. She let her fingers linger, drawing down to trace over the comfortingly familiar line of Kara’s jaw, and followed but didn’t touch the bruises under Kara’s eyes with her thumb.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sure if she meant for the way Kara was hurting now, bruised and cut open, or the way Alex had made her hurt in much the same way. With a sigh, she leaned over to kiss Kara. It was little more than the brushing together of lips, but Kara made a broken, yearning sound and her joy and trepidation sunk hooks into Alex’s heart and pulled. When she tried to straighten, Kara slid a hand behind her neck to keep her close, and Alex had to balance precariously on the bed, painfully aware of Kara’s injuries.

She didn’t pull away again until her lungs ached from lack of oxygen. When she did, Kara was beaming up at her.

“I’m not doing this because you could have died,” Alex said, unable to break the connection. Her fingers traced over patches of unbroken skin to reassure herself of Kara’s solidity. She had to close her eyes against the memory of Kara on the broken, patchy feed, covered in blood and so very, very vulnerable with her strength drained away. “I’m doing it because I’m allowed to be happy, and you make me happy, Kara.” She looked away for a moment and swallowed hard. “I love you. I should have said it before, but I’m saying it now. I want there to be an _us_. I want everything that means. I want to fall asleep next to you every night and wake up to you every morning. You’re it for me.”

She bit her bottom lip and shrugged helplessly, heart racing with the terrifying plunge off a cliff that was confession.

Tears welled in Kara’s eyes even as her smile settled into something crooked and content. She shifted restlessly in the bed, trying to struggle up onto her elbows. “Are you sure it’s not because I could have died?”

Alex pushed her gently back. “Not even a little,” she said, brushing a kiss against Kara’s forehead. She caught an escaped tear with her thumb and chased it away. “We have a lot to figure out, but right now, you should get some rest.”

It was clear Kara would have protested, but the drugs they’d given her to dull the pain and promote healing hadn’t yet dissipated. As if Alex’s words had brought it about, she yawned and then scowled, the picture of betrayal.

“Okay,” she allowed, “but stay with me for a little while.”

Alex wrapped her hand around Kara’s and settled in.

\------

She awoke to a crick in her neck and the warm, reassuring comfort of love suffusing her. It felt as if someone had turned on a tap, dowsing her in it until she was filled up with sunshine, and Alex opened her eyes slowly, not quite sure she wasn’t still dreaming.

“Hey,” Kara said softly, and Alex straightened to see Kara with her head turned to the side, watching her.

“Ugh, fell asleep,” Alex muttered, drawing her hand away from Kara’s so that she could stretch. She sighed as vertebra cracked, releasing tension, and rubbed at her face to push back at the lingering lethargy of sleep. “How are you feeling?”

“Like a human, presumably,” Kara said, smiling.

Alex nodded, still shy. She felt her words of love as if they were a presence in the room, filling up all the spaces in between.

“No powers, Alex.” Kara somehow managed to fidget while mostly immobilized in a hospital bed. “Breakable.”

“Which is why you’re going to stay right where you are until you’re unbreakable again.” Alex stood, rolling her shoulders to remove any lingering kinks and grateful for the excuse of a distraction. “I’m going to find your chart. I’m a little concerned no one’s been in to check on you.”

Kara refrained from letting Alex know someone had, but that Alex had slept through it.

“Don’t,” she said, hesitant and cautious. “Please don’t leave. I want to ask you something.”

The love still pulsing through her stilled Alex’s hand on the doorknob in a way the words alone might not have. She turned, back to the door, and nodded her assent for Kara to continue.

Kara managed to push herself up into a sitting position, doing her best to keep the pain it caused her off of her face. It wasn’t a time for weakness, not when Alex might use any opportunity to say no. “I have to ask.” She shifted nervously, looking up at Alex with a fragile kind of trepidation that made Alex want to draw her in close. “I don’t know when I’ll get the opportunity again.”

Alex watched her silently, eyes dark and patient, which almost made the asking more difficult.

“You might not be ready and I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, but Alex, when I’m like this, you can—” She ducked her head, afraid to see Alex’s reaction— “you can mark me. If you did it now, it might even scar before my powers came back. It might stay.”

“Kara…”

“And I know it will hurt,” Kara interrupted, not yet ready to hear Alex’s refusal. “I know it’s not ideal, but I want it, Alex, if you want it.”

Her heart fell as Alex turned to face the door again. She watched as Alex’s fingers fell to the handle, fingertips resting against the metal, and waited for the sound of the door opening. She told herself she wasn’t going to cry, because Alex loved her and maybe this was too soon and Alex wouldn’t want to cause her pain, so it was logical. It was logical and Alex was logical. Probably the most logical person she knew outside of Eliza, which made sense because Alex had to learn it somewhere. So she was just being logical, and she didn’t want to cause Kara pain, and those were okay things to be.

And then Alex moved, and her fingers were tapping against the interface to the left of the door. It flashed red, and Kara blinked in confusion.

LOCKED: ACCESS RESTRICTED. AUTHORIZATION A. DANVERS.

“Alex?”

“Okay,” Alex said, still facing the door. She leaned into it for a moment, forehead resting against the wood, and Kara waited, tense and uncertain but so, so hopeful. “But I need to see, Kara. I need to see that this isn’t going to hurt you any more than it has to.”

Kara nodded mutely and watched as Alex stiffened her shoulders, turned, and forced herself to meet Kara’s eyes.

There was something peaceful about sitting on the edge of the surprisingly comfortable mattress. The gown was standard and unflattering but the look on Alex’s face as she slid gentle fingers behind Kara’s neck to undo the tie there was reverential. She moved through each of them with the same care, stepping close to reach around Kara without touching, before drawing the soft, thin cloth away. Kara felt as if she should have been self-conscious, bare in the hospital bed as Alex’s fingers explored the edges of cuts half-healed before she’d lost the ability to regenerate and ghosted over bruises ranging from a painful deep black to a nearly healed green. She watched the play of emotions across Alex’s face – a hint of sorrow, a touch of fear, a gentle yearning – and tried not to shiver under the skim of her fingertips.

When Kara spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. “Don’t do this just for me, Alex.”

“I’m not.” Alex put a finger under Kara’s chin, drew her face up until their eyes met, and let her see everything. She let Kara see love and desire, and the desperate yearning to be part of a finished circle.

Kara swallowed hard. “Will you…” she asked, reaching out to tug at the collar of Alex’s DEO-issued polo, feeling suddenly, unaccountably vulnerable.

It was so quiet that Kara could hear the scrape of fabric even with her human-equivalent ears. Alex pulled the polo free and reached behind herself to flick open the clasp of her bra, holding it to her for a moment before finally dropping it onto the seat of the chair she’d used for her nap. Her hands moved hesitantly to the waistband of her pants, but instead of undoing the button, she toed out of her boots instead. Kara reacquainted herself with the shapes of Alex’s body. She relearned the way the curve of her shoulder gave way to the line of her collarbone. She searched for changes the baby may have made and found none. Alex’s breasts had always been full. Her abdomen was still flat, the skin soft as she traced her way down so that her fingers rested on Alex’s immobile hands. She felt the slight callus at the second joint of Alex’s thumb and then the thick, rough fabric of her BDU pants as she took over from where Alex had trailed off. Eyes locked with Alex’s, on guard for any hint of hesitation, she slid the button free and pulled down the zipper so slowly that the parting click of each set of teeth could be heard.

Alex stared at her for a long moment, before sliding her hands over Kara’s and shucking the pants and the underwear beneath down her thighs and lower, until gravity took over and she could step free.

She ran her hands along the inside of Kara’s thighs and swayed forward to bump into the hand Kara had unconsciously splayed across her stomach. Kara managed a whimper as Alex stepped into the space left behind, pressing in tight against her. She wrapped herself around Alex, arms around her neck and feet hooked behind her knees, and dropped her head to the crook of Alex’s neck. She kissed the mark she’d left behind, beyond pleased when Alex cried out and arched against her.

“If you keep doing that…” Alex warned, voice liquid against Kara’s ear in a way that sent shivers down her spine.

Kara leaned back with a grin, charmed by the way Alex smiled shyly and nervously tucked her hair behind her ear as if they weren’t naked together in a medbay recovery room locked deep in the heart of the DEO. Alex’s hands landed on her hips, careful and gentle, as she leaned forward to kiss the grin from Kara’s lips. It was a languid kiss, unhurried in a way they’d never had the luxury of before, and Kara melted into it. She couldn’t help wondering if that was what it would have been like if they’d allowed themselves this before. If they’d done this as carefree teenagers, maybe, who’d snuck away to hide in precariously hidden nooks and crannies, kissing until their lips were sore with it.

“Stop it,” Alex said, sliding her hands around to cup Kara’s neck, her thumbs tracing soft paths along her jawline. “Whatever it is that’s making you sad, let it go.”

She laughed at Kara’s pout, kissed it away. “I’ve never gotten to touch you like this,” she said, drawing restless fingers down Kara’s arm, leaving the tiny hairs there standing to attention in her wake. It was a soft touch, exploratory, with the promise that it’d be gone if she felt she was causing Kara even a hint of pain. She watched closely, eyes locked with Kara’s, and when Kara’s eyes slid lazily closed and her smile remained without strain, she found the unbruised skin skirting around her ribs and the flat of her abdomen. She hovered over the nearly mended slice cutting diagonally over her sternum, then slowly, carefully cupped Kara’s breast.

Kara whimpered as Alex’s thumb brushed against a hardened nipple. She wanted more, more pressure, Alex’s hands rough against her painting bruises into the unbruised skin, but she knew better than to ask. Still, “ _Alex_ ,” she gasped, near breathless at the feel of Alex surrounding her, touching her, wanting her.

“We’ve never gotten to be soft with one another.” Alex drew her tongue along the shell of Kara’s ear, and it was almost too much. She reached out, ignoring the pull of torn but mending skin, and dug her fingers into the curve of Alex’s hip. It seemed somehow absurd that she was so far gone so quickly from little more than the path left behind by gentle hands and the warmth of Alex’s mouth against her neck and ear, but she was.

“Alex, _please_.”

“I don’t want to hurt you. You have to promise to tell me if anything I do is too much,” Alex said, and Kara shivered. The timbre of Alex’s voice, the brush of warm breath against her ear… she couldn’t do anything less. “I can try to make this easier for you, but not if it only hurts you another way.”

“Anything, Alex,” she promised fervently. She knew what Alex meant, knew that without her rut in force there was little to balance out the pain of the bite. She knew, too, that Alex was worried about her, about compounding the stress on torn and bruised flesh, but Kara was beyond such trivialities.

When Alex pulled back far enough to look Kara in the eye once again, her gaze was dark. Hypnotic. “We can’t risk people being able to see,” she said, brushing her thumb against the place usually reserved for a mate’s bite. “It’s better if people don’t know that Supergirl has weaknesses.”

Whether she meant the bite or what it represented, Kara wasn’t sure. She turned her head to the side and pulled her hair over her opposite shoulder, baring the nape of her neck. “Here, then.”

It wasn’t the way of the alpha, either to bare the back of the neck or to allow teeth to scar it, but Kara couldn’t find it in herself to care.

Alex’s response was a soft kiss pressed just to the right of her spine, almost at her hairline. It felt like a promise, and Kara had to bite her bottom lip to keep from crying out.

“Remember your promise,” Alex said, letting her fingers once again skim down Kara’s body. Her hand brushed against the soft hair between Kara’s legs, and for a moment, Alex simply cupped her, feeling the heat of her against her palm. Kara stirred restlessly, needing more, and with the move, Alex felt wetness against the tips of her fingers. “If it’s too much, if it hurts…”

And Kara made a promise she doubted she could keep. “I’ll tell you. I promise.”

Alex moved slowly and deliberately. She ran her fingers along Kara’s labia, each pass spreading her by millimeters until she was slipping through wetness. Without heat or rut between them, Kara’s cock remained in retreat, quiescent, leaving only enough of a hint of it behind to be indistinguishable in form or function from a clitoris. She surged forward into Alex’s fingers as she brushed against it, and Alex bit down on the skin above her pulse point reflexively.

“Be still,” she warned, the word muffled against Kara’s skin.

Kara managed a nod for another impossible promise.

Alex kept her touch light, refusing to be rushed. “I want you to scoot a little closer to the edge of the mattress. Can you do that for me?”

Her hands fell to Kara’s thighs as Kara inched forward, squeezing lightly to indicate when Kara was where she wanted her. “Perfect.” She kissed Kara again, allowing herself to feel Kara against her. Their breasts brushed as Kara took in a deep breath, and Alex surged into her gently, feeling Kara wet and open against her. Despite everything – Kara’s injuries, the less than ideal setting – it was a perfect moment, the kind she wanted to wrap away and keep forever.

And perhaps she would have stayed there, kissing Kara until their lips were swollen and sore, had she not had another goal. “Remember—” she reached deliberately behind Kara to pluck one of the pillows from the mattress and dropped it to the floor, eyes locked on Kara’s as she sank slowly down to her knees— “tell me if I need to stop.”

Kara breathed out a sigh of mingled contentment and relief as Alex’s mouth found her. She wound her fingers through Alex’s hair, for once not worried about what might happen if she forgot herself in the moment. It pulled at the mostly healed cut along her shoulder and made the bruises around her ribs ache, but she wasn’t going to complain. Alex’s tongue was hot against her, and as maddeningly soft and gentle as her touch had been. A shift and she slid her thighs over Alex’s shoulders, momentarily furious at her injuries as Alex grinned up at her, amused, and pressed a kiss to her inner thigh. Fury that slid away when Alex drew Kara into her mouth, tongue and suction working together to make it almost impossible for her to remain upright.

She planted her free hand into the mattress, dug her heels into Alex’s back, and moaned. Alex had been right. They’d never had the luxury of soft, but there, in the slightly chilly, coldly sterile medbay recovery room, Kara was bathed in it. Her own whimpers mingled with the sounds of Alex’s mouth – decadent and wet. Her hand slid to the back of Alex’s head, and when Alex looked up at her, eyes dark, it was almost too much.

“Alex, I can’t…” She trailed off, fingers digging into Alex’s scalp as her hips bucked forward involuntarily. She cursed Kryptonite for all of its strength-stealing vicissitude. “I need to lay down.”

Alex rose and pressed a kiss to Kara’s mouth, letting her taste herself. “Of course. We’ll do this when you’re ready. We’re in no hurry.”

She tugged at the back of Alex’s neck, frustrated, knowing just that she _wanted_. “I’m ready _now_.”

“Fine,” Alex countered. “We’ll do this when _I_ think you’re ready.”

Kara would have protested, but Alex kissed her again.

“Lay back.” Alex’s hands were gentle against her shoulders, guiding her back onto the mattress. She let Alex place her, rolling up onto her uninjured shoulder, desperate to do whatever Alex wanted just so long as she’d touch her again. “Just like that.”

When Alex slid slowly onto the bed behind her, Kara sagged against her in relief. Every inch of Alex was pressed against every inch of her, from shoulders to knees. It felt so good, so right, and she mourned every second since the last time she’d felt Alex’s skin on her own. She fumbled at Alex’s hand, catching it and bringing it down between her legs, and Alex made a noise that came from the back of her throat and gently pressed her teeth into Kara’s skin, a pretext to things to come.

“Patience,” Alex growled into her shoulder, her fingers already moving.

She couldn’t give Kara the kind of orgasm their other coming togethers had produced, not with Kara vulnerable and injured. Instead she worked her up slowly, a level at a time, until Kara’s chest was heaving and her words were edging on sobs. Until Kara was begging, buttocks and thighs tense against her as she strained desperately in search of her peak.

Alex found the spot she’d claimed as her own and fit her teeth into place.

Feeling it, Kara’s breath stopped suddenly, and Alex felt the tremors begin to radiate through her. She waited a beat, for the stutter and stop and the moan forced free, and as Kara pressed back against her, liquid and shuddering, she bit down.

\------

A sharp rap on the door woke them.

Alex’s first instinct was movement. Spring up and square up or roll and hide. It took her a moment to reorient, both to the moment and to the situation, both of which were new. The moment was the feel of early morning, even if there were no windows giving lie to the first blush of sunlight, and Kara laying half on top of her.

“Agent Danvers.” The voice was muffled by the still locked and closed door. “We’d really like to assess Supergirl’s condition.”

The situation was two very naked people, a messy, bloody mating bite, and impatient medical staff knocking at the door.

“Of course,” Alex said hoarsely, licking at her lips and tasting copper. She scrubbed at her face and tried to force herself into fully awake mode, aware that ramifications were crouched down in the weeds, ready to spring as soon as she managed to clear away the stupefaction of sleep and not at all with it enough to face them. “Just give us a few minutes, okay.”

Kara was a lost cause, sleeping so heavily she was snoring. Alex could have forced her into consciousness had she been able to bring herself to interrupt Kara’s rest. Instead, she wiggled and shimmied, careful with a Kara that was on the mend, recently claimed, and undeniably vulnerable.

The tile was cold against her feet as she slipped free, supporting Kara’s back and shoulders so she wouldn’t land on the mattress with a thump. Alex grimaced at the bite she’d left behind, angry red gouges dug into Kara’s temporarily vulnerable skin. Even though she’d lapped and nuzzled, nurturing their newly made connection, blood had still seeped free in thick, sluggish trails. On her, too, Alex realized, as she stepped into the adjacent bathroom and ran water over a washcloth. The first one she used on herself, wiping at her nose and chin and at the smears on her upper chest. The second she took with her, keeping her touch soft as she began to clean her new mate.

Despite her care, Kara stirred as Alex pressed the hospital-rough washcloth to the nape of her neck. Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked up at Alex with a crooked, happy smile that didn’t dim even when Alex began to clean areas she knew had to be tender. “Hey.”

Alex was sure she should be grumpy. After all, there was no way this wouldn’t make the rounds. Agent Danvers setting her own restricted authorization lock on Supergirl’s hospital room and not removing it until requests were made by medical staff? Time unaccounted for wherein Supergirl acquired a very new and very particular wound? Once again her private life was going to be on display. She’d be the object of gossip, rumors, and innuendo, and there was little she hated more.

Instead, she smiled back at Kara just as dopily as Kara was smiling up at her.

“Hey, yourself.”

It was absolutely not the kind of conversation she’d anticipated after something so momentous, but Alex couldn’t bring herself to care. Everything that’d been caught up in the dam their incomplete bond had caused had broken free. Instead of the ever building thrum of inescapable, agitating emotions, there was lightness. Connection. The endless cycling back and forth of love shared.

Kara brought a hand up to her breastbone, fingers stroking absently at the valley between her breasts. “I think I can feel you. You’re… happy.”

Alex blushed. “I might be.”

“And you love me.”

Kara hooked a hand behind her neck and tugged her down, forcing Alex to brace her palms against the bed. A Kara minus her super-strength meant that Alex could flex a little muscle and resist, just enough so that Kara’s bright blue eyes were all she could see. “Possibly.”

“Like, a lot.”

Even with all of the available evidence, the slightest bit of doubt still crept into Kara’s gaze.

Alex melted. “More than anything,” she whispered, and brought their lips together.

\------

It wasn’t so much that the explanations were awkward, because no explanations were needed.

“I see,” was all the doctor had said, glancing back and forth between Kara’s toothy grin and Alex’s moderately disgruntled embarrassment.

It didn’t become more than sly looks and a bit of borderline unprofessional innuendo until Kara flatly refused to be taken to the solar recovery room.

“I can’t. It’ll heal.” She looked to Alex for support, eyes pleading. “Give me another few days. Let it start to scar. Please.”

Alex sighed, heart tugged hard by the frantic pull of Kara’s desperation. “You need to be at your best,” she said, willing Kara to understand. “Someone attacked you.”

“As long as I’m here, I’m safe.” Kara looked beyond consolation, eyes wet and knuckles white where her hands gripped the sheets. “What if it goes away, Alex? What if we lose this? What if I’m left alone again?”

The fear in Kara’s voice drew her forward. “Never,” Alex vowed, wrapping a hand around Kara’s neck. Her fingers brushed against the crisp new bandage hiding the mark she’d left behind, and at the proximity of her touch, Kara settled slightly. “You’ll never be alone again. I promise.”

“It’s selfish. I know it’s selfish.” Kara looked up at her imploringly. “I need to be out there, protecting people, but now I know what it’s like to share everything, Alex. I can’t give this up. I can’t.”

For a moment, Alex was lost. She was caught between ends without proper resolution. Kara was injured and could be healed. It was the obvious course of action. Then again, Kara had pit her own desires against the selflessness of Supergirl and was begging to be the one who mattered most, if only just this once. Alex’s heart broke, mended, and broke again. Kara always mattered most. Had always and would always, even when Alex and the world and everything in it made her doubt it. She was asking – no, begging – for one thing of her own. One normal thing, this connection between them. A connection she could have made back on Krypton, had she and the planet aged together. She wanted to be loved and to have the proof of it etched in her skin.

“Okay,” Alex said, kissing Kara even as her tears broke free, heedless of the medbay staff hovering in the doorway. “You’re right. You’re safe. If this is what you want, you absolutely have a right to it.”

Kara sought out Alex’s bite and pressed her palm to the scar, completing the connection. Alex fell into a cloud of love, love, love and stayed there, ignoring the huff of an exasperated doctor and the scuttle of feet behind a softly closed door.

\------

Alex commandeered an on-call room. The twin bed was a tight fit and there were no embellishments to speak of beyond the thin, bare desk with its splayed triangle of a phone. The attached bathroom was equally small and sterile, with a shower that absolutely could not be occupied comfortably by more than one person at a time, no matter how earnestly Kara tried to convince her. It was as cramped and claustrophobic as a small college dorm made somehow smaller, but neither of them had ever been happier.

The bed should have been too tiny to hold anything other than two people snuggled tightly together, but Kara had curled up into a ball. Her ear was pressed to Alex’s belly and her feet were hanging over the edge of the mattress, and Alex could feel Kara’s smile against her skin.

“We’ll be able to see her soon,” Kara said, pressing up into Alex’s hand as she carded her fingers through Kara’s hair.

They were naked, sweat drying in the cool air. Alex’s heartbeat was slow and sated and she stirred sluggishly, having to fight back sleep.

“You think it’s a girl?”

Kara nodded against her. She placed a kiss against Alex’s stomach and slid up the bed, throwing an arm and a leg across Alex’s torso and burying her face against Alex’s shoulder.

They were a little feverish, drunk themselves on the high of a mating bond completed and reinforced by days spent holed away together. For the first time in a long time, they had abandoned everything – duty, responsibilities, worries, and hang-ups. They’d taken back what Red K had stolen from them, the self-indulgence that cemented a commitment given freely.

Alex found enough energy to turn her head to the side to place a kiss against Kara’s forehead. “No peeking, okay. We find out things together.”

“Or I…”

“No.”

“ _Alex_.”

“Kara.”

Kara huffed out a sulky sigh.

“Kara, promise.”

“Fine,” she grumbled even as she nipped playfully at Alex’s bite, happier than she’d ever known she had the capability to be. “I promise.”

\------

Alex aches. Her entire lower body is an angry sting of overused muscles: hips, inner thighs, even, somehow, the arches of her feet. She’s exhausted and wonders for a moment what it is she’s done to leave her in such a state.

Beside her, Kara shifts, a hand sliding across the mattress in search of something. In search of her, Alex realizes, head suddenly very, very clear for the first time in… how long? There’s no way to tell. She searches for snippets of memory and shrinks away from what she finds, an increasingly explicit montage that goes on and on. The evidence is tale-tell now that she’s able to think again, no longer trapped in the confusing haze of heat. She can feel it on her thighs, a wet smear, and smell it in the air. Her neck throbs, and when she brings her fingers to the epicenter of the ache, she finds torn and tender skin.

What has she done? What have _they_ done?

All those years, all that time spent reordering her life and drawing boundaries around her relationship with Kara – all useless now. She’s tried so hard for so long. _Is sex more important than your relationship with your sister_ , Eliza had asked. It hadn’t been. It isn’t. She’s Kara’s protector, her confidant, the one person in all the world Kara can trust to have her best interests at heart, no matter what.

And now… what has she _done_?

Kara lays nestled in the sheets, one arm curled under a pillow and her hair tousled. She’s gorgeous, muscles and curves and smooth, soft skin, and Alex knows every inch of her. If she hadn’t before, she does now. She’s run her hands over the contours of Kara’s back and the slope of her calves. She’s kissed her way across the lanky segmentation of her abdomen and tasted her breasts. She’s taken her cock – in her hands, her mouth, her pussy – and slid her own fingers into the soft, wet opening tucked away behind Kara’s shaft. She’s been held down by the world’s strongest being and held her down in turn.

She feels numb, an accident victim who hasn’t yet registered the full impact of her crash. Kara had been compromised and she’d gone out to her. It had been stupid of her. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and look where they are now, and it’s all her fault. If she’d been faster, smarter… if she’d been something other than plain old Alex Danvers, ineffectual human, then there wouldn’t be fallout waiting to crash down. There wouldn’t be regrets. There wouldn’t be Kara crying on a recovery table, the way she had the last time someone had deployed Red K against her.

Alex stands on wobbly legs, hissing as her feet hit the cold floor. She finds her boots. The last she’d seen of her clothes, Kara had ripped her pants to shreds and divested her of her shirt somewhere in the entrance hall. She has no idea where her underwear has gone or if it’s even survived, so she pulls Kara’s cape around her like a blanket and ducks out of the room, hoping that Kara remains asleep. She shivers as she walks down dark, icy hallways, glad that the Fortress seems to have some sort of temperature regulation mechanism that keeps her from developing frostbite.

She finds her shirt hidden behind a pillar of ice. The prototype delivery mechanism is still attached, thankfully, and she palms it. She’s shivering by the time she makes it back to the room they’ve shared – warmer than the rest – and finds Kara sitting up and blinking her eyes, already looking for her.

“Where’d you go?” Kara asks sleepily, watching her with the uncanny intensity brought about by the intersection of her rut and Red K.

Alex doesn’t answer. She isn’t sure she can, isn’t sure she can lie to Kara, so she crawls onto Kara’s lap, straddling strong thighs. Kara tugs at the edges of the cape, drawing Alex closer, and smirks at the sight of her.

“You look good in this,” she says, and then her mouth is on Alex’s neck, warm and distracting.

Alex wraps her arms around Kara, holds her tight in a hug that’s more comfort than sex. She’s already mourning, each of the things that are about to go very badly laying themselves out in her mind as she detaches the cap on the pen holding the antidote. A bead of lead encases the tip, like the wax sealed around the nibs of ballpoint pens; she flicks it off with her thumb. Maybe Kara registers the Kryptonite. It’s difficult to tell, but she pulls back from Alex’s neck and looks up at her, confusion wrinkling her brow, in the second before Alex jams the Kryptonite-tipped needle into the back of Kara’s shoulder and depresses the button that administers the antidote.

There’s no sound other than Kara’s grunt of pain and surprise. Of betrayal, maybe, because the way she looks at Alex before the Red K starts to leave her system is painful to see. Alex isn’t sure why she thought the spring-loaded delivery system would hiss. Maybe it’s that something so momentous needs embellishment. It shouldn’t be allowed to be so mundane – a press of a button, and the world collapses.

Awareness comes to Kara slowly, the way it had to Alex when she’d finally pulled free of her heat. She stays where she is, partly because she doesn’t have the strength to pull away, and watches as horror and panic spread across Kara’s face. She ends up near the edge of the bed when Kara pushes her away, choking on apologies and self-recrimination.

“Alex…” Tears are already flowing unchecked, Kara’s eyes red even though it’s only been a minute. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m…”

Alex sinks deeper into her numbness, silent in the face of Kara’s grief. She’s pulled a loose sheet over her lap and is sitting there in her boots and Kara’s cape, watching everything fall apart. Kara scrambles out of the bed as if it’s burned her, and for a moment, only her head is visible over the edge of it. She hasn’t stopped apologizing since she returned to herself, fervent promises that _she would never_ , that _she didn’t mean_ , that _never, Alex. Never_.

And Alex waits to come back to herself, to find some way out of the nightmare that is her most important relationship shattering right in front of her eyes. She’s uncomfortably aware of her breasts, bare beneath the cape, and the way she’s still wet – half her, half Kara. She doesn’t even have any pants, for fuck’s sake, and Kara’s already back in her suit and looking at her like she’s the aftermath of a natural disaster.

“I can’t… I can’t be here,” Kara says, face slick with tears and mouth twisted with regret. Alex has seen Kara devastated before, after the last time, only now she’s not standing bedside with forgiveness and rational plans of action on hand. “What did I _do_ , Alex? How _could_ I?”

There are no answers because the answers are self-evident. What and how are plain to see, and Alex can’t stop the images flashing through her mind. She remembers all of it, every second, every act, every word and kiss and touch. It’s nothing like the first time, when they were young and innocent and caught off-guard. They’re all grown up and have moved through a lifetime’s worth of fantasies in… however long they’ve been there.

“I’m sorry,” Kara says again, mournfully, and Alex looks at her. She sees regret, fear, and sorrow, and wonders if it’s mirrored on her own face.

Then Kara is gone, and Alex is all alone. She sits for a while and feels just as alone as she is, trapped in the Arctic in the hidden hideaway of the remnants of the House of El. When the silence becomes too much, she forces herself to move. There’s an en-suite bathroom with a massive, heated bathing pool. She doesn’t know how it’s there (or really even why), but she sheds her boots and submerges herself in the water. She finds soap and uses it to scrub herself clean, and when J’onn announces his presence softly, she’s back in her boots and the polo she salvaged, wrapped in Kara’s cape once again.

He takes a moment to study her. She knows he sees the bruises and the bite mark, so she straightens her shoulders and refuses to look as embarrassed as she feels. She forces herself to meet his eyes and nearly flinches away from the kindness in them.

“Let’s get you home,” he says, reaching for her with deliberate care. He waits to touch her until she nods and holds her to him gently as they fly back to DEO HQ, where her bite mark is treated and shots are given and the doctors give embarrassed, vague promises that things will be fine, that everything’s taken care of, and there’s no need to worry. Clothes are fetched from her locker and she’s bundled up in soft sweats, and Alex wants to tell everyone to stop treating her as if she’s broken. She thinks that maybe they think she’s been traumatized; she has, but not the way that all of their hesitant touches and soft promises seem to imply. She’d lost the ability to control herself, but so had Kara, and anyway, none of them knew. They see but don’t recognize the implications of an off-center bite wedged between her shoulder blade and spine. They don’t know that this particular tragedy has been over a decade in the making, or that the worst part about it is that she doesn’t know how to rebuild now. She doesn’t know how to wall herself off again, or what she’s supposed to do with all of the things she now knows.

And Kara… who knows what she’s thinking or where’s she gone. Alex tries to be rational about it, because Kara’s distraught and disconsolate and guilty. She needs some time – they both do. Someone had to tell J’onn where she was, and Kara’s the only likely option, but sending help doesn’t negate the fact that Kara left her, alone, stranded, and vulnerable. Red K or not, Kara had called for her. She’d fucked her. She’d bitten her. She didn’t get to do those things and _leave_.

“Let’s get you home.” J’onn places a gentle hand on her shoulder, urging her out of the medbay since Alex has emphatically refused to stay. “What do you want to eat? We’ll pick up something.”

She steps away, a gentle rebuke, and wraps her hands tight around the straps of the duffel they’d brought down from her locker. The last thing she wants is to have eyes on her, cataloging every nervous twitch and suspicious hitch of breath. “I’m okay,” she says, a blatant untruth. She’s focused on putting one foot in front of the other and doesn’t care about much else. She has to leave, has to be away from the DEO and from all of the people watching her, just waiting for her to break. “Thanks for everything, Hank. I’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t let her go easily but he does let her go. She’s not riding her bike in sweats, so she takes one of the pool vehicles. It’s a sleek black SUV with tinted windows, and the size of it is as comforting as the way it obscures her. It’s late anyway, probably near midnight, so there’s no one to see as she makes her way to the apartment slowly. She’s exhausted and sore and runs a hot salt bath, bypassing a refrigerator she knows to be mostly empty.

Later, when she’s soaked until she’s pruned and she’s drained the water and turned on the shower to wash the salt from her skin, she lets the first tear fall. She’s not entirely sure why she’s crying, not sure there’s a specific reason beyond _everything’s all fucked up_. She cries until the water runs cold and then she towels off, sets out work clothes for the next morning, and checks to make sure her alarm is set.

\------

“I won’t be long.”

It was nearly impossible to continue to function in the face of Kara’s pout, but Alex knew that if they didn’t separate at some point, they never would. They had to tear off the band-aid before they became even more codependent. Her excuse wasn’t even an excuse. Kara was restarting solar recovery therapy, which meant she’d be going home soon. Home meant the loft, and home meant Alex, because she’d agreed, finally, to Kara’s invitation. It wasn’t as if she was going to pack up her entire apartment – she’d let Kara do that, eventually, because there was no need for movers when Supergirl could have her moved in a fraction of the time. Essentials – that’s all she was moving, and if she did it now, Kara might mope but she’d do so from the warm embrace of healing UV therapy which meant a step forward toward their new life.

Kara’s mournful expression was far more effective than Alex would have liked.

“I’ll bring you a treat,” she said, kissing Kara softly. It quickly turned into more, and it wasn’t until someone cleared their throat in the background that Alex managed to pull herself away. “Okay,” she said, blushing. “I’m going now.”

The cool night air made her feel like she was engaging in subterfuge after days spent inside the DEO. It tingled against skin that felt things a little more vibrantly than usual, and if Alex hadn’t been in public, she would have laughed. She was beyond fear, worry, and shame. They’d made it through Red K, made it through hesitation and misunderstandings, and made it through a deliberate attempt to end Kara, and they were still standing. They were together.

They were happy, Alex thought giddily as she pulled into the space designated for her apartment and shut off her vehicle. All of that, and they’d found their way back to happy.

“Agent Danvers?”

There was nothing threatening about the voice, other than the fact that it was asking for a person it shouldn’t have known to ask for. Alex was already reaching for her gun as she turned and had it out and pointed at the figure dressed all in black in the second it took for her to square up.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” the stranger said, tapping at the space just above his heart.

Alex tried to stay calm as she glanced down, catching site of an unmistakable red dot placed with deadly precision against her chest. She took a second to assess her options. She was still standing inside the opened door of the SUV she’d borrowed, and in the time it would take for her to close it and disappear around the front of the vehicle, she’d likely be dead. The man in black was positioned so that he could quickly cut off any avenue of escape if she tried to make a break for it back into the open space of the lot. The roof of the car next to her came up to mid-chest. Theoretically, she could vault over it if she kicked off from the running board on her DEO SUV. If she was lucky, she could be across it before the sniper was able to adjust. From there, she’d have to stay out of sight and handle the on-the-ground assailant one-on-one, but if she timed it right…

“It really would be better for you if you came with us,” the man said as a panel van barreled to a stop behind him. The side door opened and two additional black-clad figures spilled out, each with an automatic weapon strapped to their chest and pointed at her.

Alex readjusted her grip on her sidearm.

Maybe if she dropped down and scrambled under the chassis of the SUV. She knew she’d fit – she’d hidden under one before. She’d need to be lucky, but then again, there probably were few ways to make it out of sight of multiple people with guns without a fair bit of luck.

“Our employer wants us to take you alive, but it doesn’t have to be in one piece.”

Under the car it was, Alex decided.

She squeezed off a shot as she dropped, catching the man in front of her square in the chest. Above her, she heard a bullet shatter glass, and the hurried, agitated footsteps of the other two goons. Heat poured off of the catalytic converter as she scrambled under the undercarriage on her elbows, popping up on the other side of the SUV only to have the window of the car to her right explode. One hundred feet away stood the door to the stairs that would lead to her apartment’s lobby, and from there, maybe she could get back out onto the street. There was no way she’d make it scrabbling under cars, so she crouched low, hoping the size of the SUV would hide her, and skidded on glass as she headed for the slim space between the front of the parked car and the concrete wall.

She darted forward before she could second-guess herself, and the two bearing automatic weapons opened fire. Bullets dug into metal and chips of concrete showered down over her as she ran, keeping as low as she could.

“We need her alive!” someone shouted behind her, a warning against being overzealous that Alex wasn’t sure anyone was going to follow.

With only five cars behind her, Alex’s head start evaporated. One set of boots ran past her, intent on closing off her exit, while another moved slowly and cautiously, checking the thin alley between each car before moving on. She needed to buy more time, so she slid under another SUV and stilled, eyes fastened on the person checking the gaps, her handgun outstretched and ready to fire. As if sensing it, their steps slowed. They were still one car behind, and Alex watched with growing despair as they lowered into a crouch. Just as the assailant’s head was about to dip down low enough to see, Alex fired, catching him square in the thigh. She’d hoped he would draw even with her position before she shot, fully intending to use him as a human shield. If she couldn’t reach the stairs, it would at least be better to have four options for movement instead of the three she had with the concrete wall bounding her in on one side.

She kicked off, scuttling out from under the bumper of the car and out into the passageway, shooting in the direction of the remaining thug as she sprinted to the opposite line of cars. A line of fire opened up along her hip just before she slammed into the space between a Civic and a CRV. A quick touch confirmed that something had drawn blood and she hissed angrily, aware that adrenaline was keeping the worst of the pain at bay but that at some point her mobility would likely be compromised.

There wasn’t much in the way of options. Parking was underground, with a ramp leading to street access, meaning she was essentially trapped in a very large room with her attackers. Each of the possible exits was a bottleneck and easier to defend than to access. If she could somehow make it back to her vehicle, maybe she could pick her way through what would undoubtedly be overlapping fields of fire, what with the sniper still hidden away somewhere. On top of one of the parked vehicles, maybe? She wasn’t sure; the only way she could triangulate their location was if she had more information, but more information came in the form of more bullets fired in her direction.

Then again, maybe she didn’t have to make it back to her vehicle. Any vehicle would do. She doubted she’d find one with the keys in the ignition, but there was the panel van. A van she was now realizing was slowly circling, adding itself to the search for her position. She could see the outline of it reflected in the back passenger’s side window of the car next to her, and crouched like a sprinter awaiting the start of a race. As it drew near, she leapt forward, counting on the fact that they apparently wanted her alive to keep her safe from mortal injury at the hands of the unseen sniper. She squeezed the trigger until she was dry firing, taking out the driver’s side window, and grabbed the door handle and pulled hard. Inside, the driver was slumped over, hanging limply in the seat belt, tilting in the direction of a passenger’s seat coated with blood. With him in the way, she was exposed. Painfully exposed and aware of the expanse of her back as an open target.

The vehicle was still creeping forward, forcing Alex to run alongside it, trying to reach across the man’s unmoving body to undo the seat belt he was wearing so she could pull him free. A sniper’s bullet took off the rear view mirror just above and to the left of her head and Alex crouched reflexively. She lost her grip on the seatbelt and considered scrambling over the man and crouching between the seats, fairly confident that she could still manage to drive. She grabbed the steering wheel to provide her with a little bit of momentum, but stopped dead in her tracks when someone – the third man, the one who’d been guarding the stairwell door – suddenly stepped out from where he’d been hiding between two cars and put the barrel of his gun against the back of her neck.

“That’s enough,” he said angrily, pressing the barrel hard into her skin. “Throw down your weapon.”

The van kept moving and the steering wheel slipped out of her fingers. No longer in a position to resist, Alex complied.


	5. denouement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which things come to a head.

The thing keeping Alex mostly sane was that she’d made it a messy abduction. There was blood, even if they’d left behind no bodies, and an apartment complex full of people who may have heard the sounds of a gunfight going on below them. Word would get back to the DEO and they’d find her. They had to.

“Check her,” the man in charge grunted. She’d already been thrown unceremoniously into the back of the van, hooded, and patted down, so she wasn’t entirely sure what more there was to check.

Moments later, she heard a burst of static coming from the vicinity of her shoulder and felt her stomach sink.

“She’s got a chip.”

“Fry it.”

The process was painless but no less devastating for it. There was an RFID tag embedded under the skin, DEO-issued and implanted in the days after she’d been brought back from the Fortress, and if her intuition was correct, it’d just been disabled. The people who’d taken her had not only known to look, but had equipment that could fuse and destroy tiny circuits, cutting off the primary line of defense left to her.

The cavalry might still come, but they no longer had a map.

“So where are we going?” she asked, only to be ignored. Her hands were zip-tied behind her, the plastic cutting into her wrists, and her ankles had been shackled. There was only enough slack for her to spread her feet out to just beyond her hips, and she’d heard the clink of chain when they’d secured her. She’d been belted into her seat and was momentarily grateful for it as they turned suddenly. A moment of vertigo told her they were descending; she’d lost track of where they might be not long after they’d left the scene of the attack, unable to visualize the myriad small changes in direction they’d made. With the incapacitation of her tracking device, she was convinced that their seemingly haphazard path had been more about confusing the people that might come after her than it had been about confusing her.

She didn’t think they’d left the city proper yet. There hadn’t been time, taking into account the misdirection, which would have given Alex more hope if only the person who could find her heartbeat in any crowd wasn’t currently recuperating on a sunbed, more human than super human.

Someone had tried to kill Kara and now she’d been abducted. Training might tell her to wait and gather facts and not make assumptions, but the connection seemed obvious. War had been declared and she’d been made into a pawn. If not, she’d already be dead, left behind in a pool of her own blood. There was no need to take a hostage unless there was something to gain, and in her case, the possible gains were numerous. The DEO’s attention, first and foremost, but beyond that, perhaps someone thought they could extract operational information. Secrets. Alter egos. Truths she’d die before revealing.

\------

She’d been left in a windowless room, hands and feet still bound but the hood removed, and her hip left bleeding sluggishly into the fabric of her pants. The room offered few clues. Her own chair was generic, the kind that populated countless office meeting rooms. The walls were beige and the carpet cheap. She’d been on an elevator at some point, which meant her kidnappers either had no fear of anyone seeing them escorting a trussed up prisoner or they had a secure entrance. She was hedging her bets on the former, that whoever took her had total control over this space, which meant money. It’d been a long elevator ride, which put her on a floor several stories up, and that kind of National City real estate didn’t come cheap.

She could stand, which seemed like an oversight. Then again, it wasn’t as if she could run away, not with a stride that might max out at a foot given the scant chain linking the shackles. A little bit of hobbling confirmed that the door had been locked, and as thorough of a search as she could give the room revealed no vulnerabilities and no tools. She had herself, her chair, a growing headache, and a wound that needed treatment. Willful denial had served her well through the adrenaline-filled fight in the garage, but the particulars of her situation were settling in and refusing to be ignored. She had no weapons, no tracker providing her location to possible rescuers, and no idea who had taken her or what their ultimate objective might be. She was also pregnant, which was something she didn’t know how to factor in with the rest.

Just a few hours earlier, she’d kissed Kara good-bye amid promises that she’d be right back. She’d been happier than she could remember, at peace with the past with her future opening up in front of her, still fragile but full of promise. And now someone was trying to threaten all that?

Alex’s jaw clenched tightly enough to creak. Fuck that.

\------

Kara runs a hand up her abdomen and between her breasts, but she doesn’t push. She settles with her palm over Alex’s heart, skin so hot Alex wonders if she’s going to leave a print burned into the skin. The thought urges her on, and she leans forward, grinding against Kara. It feels so good, Kara hot inside her, hot against her. Skin like silk, and all Alex has to do is rock, faster and faster, chasing pleasure. Kara is grinning up at her, satisfied and just a tetch short of smug, but Alex doesn’t care. She’s earned smug, and if she wants to show it while Alex ruts against her selfishly, not worried about Kara because she’ll get hers eventually, then she can. All Alex cares about is how good it feels. She’s going to stretch this moment out, encase it in amber, and remember it one day. Remember what it feels like to be stripped down to the basest of impulses and to chase after what she wants because she wants it, rapaciously self-serving. And Kara… Kara lets her. She wants what Alex wants, wants Alex wild and unselfconscious and deliriously happy.

Alex comes with a shudder and a gasp, boneless in a second, and Kara rolls them over. She settles over Alex, still buried inside, and starts to move. It’s slow and greedy, a revel of freedom, indulgence, and skin against skin. Kara kisses her deeply, one hand tangled in Alex’s hair, and Alex wraps her legs around her, high up near the middle of Kara’s back. It’s a decade of lovemaking crammed into the tiny space they take up pressed together.

“You’re mine.” When Kara pulls back to look at her, her eyes have gone dark and her face flashes, an unnatural and angry pattern etched in red. Alex isn’t used to seeing danger on Kara. She responds to it instinctively, arching up and baring her neck and wallowing in the primal pull of Kara’s strength. Kara will protect her. She can see it in the brimming fury in Kara’s eyes and the veins of red tracing across her face. Not fury directed at her, but fury directed at the threats Kara imagines trying to take Alex from her.

“I am,” Alex soothes. She brings her hand to Kara’s cheek and uses gentle pressure to guide her down, tucking Kara’s face into the curve of her neck. “I promise. I’ll always be yours.”

Kara presses her lips to Alex’s bite and Alex slips into a state of bliss. She feels the same way she had when she was younger, wading into the ocean and letting the waves wash over her. Her body’s acute physical reactions are secondary, an undercurrent of pleasure that buoys but doesn’t eclipse the warmth and comfort of Kara’s love.

\------

“Steady,” the henchwoman said, her hand on Alex’s elbow as she led her. The hood was back over her head, hot and stifling, and Alex had to wonder at the secrecy. She was well and truly captured, outmanned and injured. She’d been offered no food and no water and her hands had been unbound only long enough for her to use the bathroom. Door open, the henchwoman had said, and watched her lazily. She saw enough of herself in the mirror to see she was a mess, dried blood streaking down her face from what had to be several small cuts and one deeper one from flying glass and debris that she’d yet to really feel. The blood had soaked into the high neck of her pullover, leaving a patch of stiff, highly saturated dark black, and she couldn’t ignore the way it rubbed roughly at her skin.

She was back in the zip-ties almost immediately, trying to figure out how to walk without stumbling. She figured they’d crossed a threshold, because light penetrated through the fabric of her hood, bright and all-encompassing. A few steps later and she was shoved into a chair, one hand heavy on her shoulder as her hood was pulled free.

She blinked, her dark-adjusted eyes aching in the too bright sun. Slowly, the figure in front of her came into focus.

“Agent Danvers,” Maxwell Lord said, exuding pompous condescension and backlit like a comic villain in front of a window-lined wall saturated by early morning sunlight. “You’ve made quite a mess of things.”

Alex surged toward him without thought, fury overriding caution, and found herself slammed back down into the chair before she managed to stand.

He rolled his shoulders as if he’d been the one to put Alex down. “All I needed was bait to help me catch a Supergirl. We could have done this without bloodshed.”

As much as Alex wanted to demand an explanation, she bided her time. He’d give it to her, she was sure, and the less information she sacrificed in return, the better.

“Did you like them? My machines?” Her silence only egged him on, and he advanced aggressively, nodding at the henchwoman as he did so. Alex found herself jerked to her feet, suddenly face-to-face with a still approaching Max Lord and uncomfortably aware of the unstable glint in his eye. Unable to stifle the impulse, she curled up protectively, bending and twisting to the side to protect her abdomen, and braced for a blow.

“Why Agent Danvers—” he said, as Alex continued to shield herself. She flinched at the sight of a hand darting toward her face, but it didn’t connect. Instead, it pulled aside the collar of her pullover and Alex winced as her bite was revealed— “It looks like a lot has happened since we last met.”

\------

Kara awoke with a start, groggy and unsettled. She felt unbalanced, like something important was missing, and took a moment to orient herself. Alex. Alex was missing. Alex had gone to grab some things from her apartment. She’d said she’d be right back, that Kara probably wouldn’t even notice she was gone.

“Alex?” she called out, alone in the now dark solar recovery room.

She slid to her feet, a little lightheaded after her session, and reached for the clothing she’d abandoned bedside. In that and a pair of untied sneakers, she ducked her head out of the door, jolting the DEO agent posted beside the door out of what appeared to be a bored trance.

“Supergirl,” the agent said, giving her a perfunctory nod before putting a hand to his ear to activate the comms device there. He tilted his chin toward his shoulder, voice lowered, as he said, “She’s awake.”

She felt her irritation rise. “What’s going on? Where’s Alex?”

The agent stared straight ahead, adam’s apple bobbing. “I can’t say, ma’am. Director Henshaw will be down shortly.”

Her sluggish brain, separated from her mate for the first time since they’d completed their bond, was stuck on one thing and one thing only. She rounded on the agent, barely noticing as he stumbled back into the wall. “ _Where’s Alex?_ ”

“Director Henshaw…”

“Isn’t here,” Kara snarled, unconcerned as the agent – another Alpha by the smell of it – cowered in front of her. “Tell me where she is.”

“I can’t.” He bared his neck under the force of her anger, barely able to function under the pheromones compelling his submission. “I don’t know. I promise I don’t.”

He was saved by the thump of rapidly approaching boots. “Supergirl.” Hank’s voice, normally soothing, did little to calm Kara’s agitation. She turned to him, shoulders forward and body primed for attack. “Come with me.”

“Where is she?” Kara asked again, the harsh tone of her voice breaking into something vulnerable as she watched the tell-tale signs flit across Hank’s face. His eyes flicked down for a moment. His mouth tightened and his brows furrowed, and Kara knew. She knew something had happened. She knew it as more than the instinct that had been driving her since she’d awoken. “Hank, please.”

Hank nodded shallowly, confirming her worst fear. “She’s been taken.”

Behind them, the Alpha agent who’d been left guarding the door fell to his knees, quivering under the force of Kara’s unstifled rage.

“Who?”

“We don’t know yet. We’ve pulled all of the surveillance footage we can find, but it’s going to take time to piece together. They fried her tracker.”

Kara didn’t have time. Someone had Alex, and every second she’d missed was a second already wasted. She didn’t have more to spare.

“Supergirl,” J’onn said, his voice low, understanding, “we need to be smart about this. You’re no good to Alex out there bellowing to the sky that you want her back.”

 “I’m no good to her here.”

She moved to push past him, but J’onn stopped her with a hand to the shoulder. “Can you even fly?”

The fact that he’d actually arrested her motion made the likelihood less than promising. She could, however, still put her fist through drywall.

“That right there, that anger? It’ll get one of you killed.”

“I’m not going to sit here and do nothing while my mate is in the hands of some psychopath! Why else would someone take her, if not to get to me?”

“The DEO has as many enemies as you, Supergirl. Agent Danvers has made some of them herself.” His expression softened. “With the attack on you, it’s clearly a possibility we have to keep in mind, but we’ve had no demands. No communication. We can’t close off any avenues. I have every available agent working on this. When we’re ready to move, I need you to be healthy. Make no mistake. We will get her back.” He looked down at the agent still prostrate on his knees. “In the meantime, try not to incapacitate my staff.”

Kara helped the agent to his feet, too worried about Alex to be worried about his pride.

\------

Maxwell Lord. She’d been so stupid, caught up in her own drama, made complacent enough to accept the lack of intel on his whereabouts and activities. Sure, the DEO had people looking for him, tracing digital trails and flows of money. Still, she’d known he was the likely source behind Kara’s re-exposure to Red K, but she hadn’t looked hard enough. She hadn’t done enough. She’d let him get away with it, and now her mistakes were standing in front of her, here to collect their due.

She wanted to knock the smirk off of his face. With prejudice.

“Well, well, this is interesting.” He motioned to his muscle, who put a foot to the back of Alex’s knee as an expedient to putting her back in the chair. She drew back as he moved in close, his nose pressed nearly to her neck as he inhaled deeply. “Mated and pregnant. You have been busy.”

Alex tried not to panic. She was already vulnerable enough without Lord – an Alpha, she remembered now – finding additional soft spots, and this particular soft spot was a big one.

“What exactly is your plan here?” she asked, refusing to react to the way he was looking at her, vicious and smug.

He ignored her. “Who’s the lucky Alpha?”

“No one you know.”

“That creature you call sister is an Alpha. Did you let her mount you?” His face twisted with disgust. “I could always smell her on you.”

Alex swallowed down rising bile.

Something in her expression must have given her away, because Lord went still. “You did,” he said, his curious monotone putting Alex on edge. He looked over her shoulder at the guard still standing behind her. “See to it that she’s cleaned up and take care of the wounds. What she’s carrying is very, very valuable.”

He looked down at her, and Alex could see nothing but evil intent in his eyes. “We’re going to have to find a place to keep you. I’ve always wanted a Kryptonian of my very own.”

\------

She was put in an empty office, of all things. There was a couch, an empty desk, and two chairs, and as soon as she was sure she was alone, she explored every inch of them. The guard had taken her down to a communal shower that was, as best as Alex could tell, attached to a nearly empty gym. She’d stepped under the water fully clothed, using the heat of it to separate fabric bound to skin that had started to scab over. The gash on her hip had re-opened, blood swirling down to circle the drain, but she’d managed to get it cleaned. Most of the scrapes on her face and neck were superficial save for the one along her hairline. It’d taken long minutes to work through the dried blood, and when she did, there was little she could do for it. Even though she’d been gentle, she’d reopened it enough to leave thick bloodstains on the only towel she’d been given. The first aid supplies had been sparse, antiseptic cream and bandages and little else. She applied a thick layer of the former to her temple and did the best she could with both when it came to her hip, but she wouldn’t have considered either “treated”.

The guard had thrown her a pair of sweatpants and an oversized tee shirt to replace her torn and bloodied clothing but left her with her boots. She was surprised to find that the shackles on her ankles hadn’t been replaced, but not surprised when her hands were bound behind her again.

“I’ll see if I can find you something to eat,” the guard said just before she closed and locked the door to the empty office, but nothing in her tone made Alex feel especially hopeful.

She had no way to know if the office was monitored. The kidnapping had been professional despite its messiness, but she suspected that Lord hadn’t actually planned to keep her prisoner for long. Bait, he’d said, and that had only changed once he’d found out she was pregnant.

She couldn’t think about the baby. Couldn’t. Couldn’t think about Kara. Couldn’t get paralyzed by fear.

Deciding there was nothing she could do about possible surveillance, she set about looking for tools for escape. It wasn’t easy to slip her bound hands underneath her hips, not with the zip-ties pulled tight. The couch helped somewhat, letting her lean and contort without falling over. Once she’d managed that, it was comparatively easy to slide her hands under her feet, leaving them in front of her. The desk offered nothing, not even a dull letter opener she could use to try and saw open the thick plastic, so she focused instead on finding a weapon. The chairs were heavy and too unwieldy to use effectively, not with her hands still bound. Even though she slid her fingers over every square inch she could reach, the drawers held not even a stray paperclip.

The drawers themselves, though… It took some patience, but she managed to jolt one off of its track and pull it free. In and of itself, it wasn’t terribly intimidating. It was lightweight particleboard, cheaper than she would have expected of furniture in Max Lord’s criminal headquarters. Then again, everything seemed sparse. It was rented space, perhaps, furnished with whatever the rental company had used for staging. Still, cheap or no, it was the best she had.

No one had rushed the office, despite her dismantling, which led her to believe that there were no video cameras hidden in the ceiling. She wasn’t sure how long the woman who’d been assigned to guard her had been gone and she wasn’t really sure if she’d actually bother to return with food, but Alex calculated that she was her best option. She hadn’t seen the rest of the hired muscle since she’d been dropped off, and had to wonder if maybe that crew had scattered in the wake of the bloody scene left at her apartment’s garage.

She waited crouched down behind the office’s only entrance for what felt like forever, until her knees protested and her back ached. She’d almost given up on the guard returning at all when she heard footsteps in the hallway, quick and precise.

“I have food,” the guard called through the door. “I want you against the far wall with your back to me. Let me know when you’re in place.”

Alex waited for a moment before cupping her hand over her mouth to muffle her voice. “Okay,” she called out faintly, hoping she’d sounded convincing enough.

Apparently she had, because the door started to swing open slowly. The first thing through was the barrel of a gun. Alex sprang up, swinging the drawer upwards like an uppercut. The blow knocked the gun upward, and plaster rained down as a reflexively fired bullet dug itself into the ceiling. Alex ignored it, bringing the drawer around in a single, continuous motion and driving it into the woman’s face even as she stepped inside her range.

The guard staggered back, clearly stunned, and Alex swung the drawer again. She didn’t quite have the leverage she wanted, not with her hands bound, but the corner of the drawer had caught the guard square in the face as the wood gave way, shattering. She howled in pain and, in the moment of shock that followed the explosion of motion, Alex placed a front kick squarely against her sternum. Under the force of it, the woman slammed into the closed door on the opposite side of the doorway and Alex pressed her advantage, bringing her hands around in a haymaker that caught the guard square on the jaw. She went for the gun next, managing to strip it.

She knew she had to work quickly. It was unlikely that no one would hear the gunshot, but she needed the guard completely incapacitated before she moved on. So, she took advantage of her limitation and hooked her bound hands behind the guard’s neck, bringing the guard’s face down even as she brought her own knee up. It was a solid hit, accompanied by the crunch of a broken nose, and the guard crumpled to the floor – dazed certainly, and possibly unconscious.

Alex scooped up the gun and ran. She didn’t know the building’s layout and had no idea how many people were scattered throughout it. From the length of the elevator ride, she surmised that there were probably more floors below her than above, though, which meant more places to hide.

She hit the door to the stairs at a full sprint and was down three flights of them in seconds. Below her, the stairwell seemed to circle infinitely downward. She didn’t want to get caught in it, but until something forced her back onto one of the floors, she was going to take her chances.

\------

“Slow down, Winn.”

“—and so all you need to do is lock onto the radioactive signature and bam! Bad guy.”

Winn came to a panting halt, looking at the small crowd gathered around him expectantly.

“Of course,” Eliza said, holding her hand out for the device Winn had created using the kryptonite deflector they’d scavenged after the fall of Fort Rozz. “You’ve isolated the wave length and calibrated this to identify it.”

“So you’re saying that this thing can track kryptonite?” J’onn asked, wanting to make sure he’d picked up on the most important parts of Winn’s rapid-fire explanation.

“Right. I mean, its effective range isn’t exactly what I’d want, but as long as you get close enough, then yes.” He straightened his tie self-consciously, eyes wide and earnest.

Kara eyed the device suspiciously. “How close is close?”

“About five hundred feet maybe? Give or take?”

“And this is assuming that the person who engineered the attack on Kara has more kryptonite and that it’s not somehow shielded.” J’onn rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. “We start in National City, obviously, and work our way out in concentric rings.”

Winn frowned. “I only have the one.”

“Then I’ll take it,” Kara said, stepping forward.

“Is that wise?” Eliza looked between all of them, feeling out of place in the discussion but unable to remain quiet. “That would put you in close proximity to the one thing we know can hurt you.”

Kara’s eyes flashed mutinously. “I’m going after Alex.”

“I want her back as much as you, Kara, but what I don’t want is to lose you both.”

Winn shrank away from the intrafamily conflict playing out in front of them but J’onn only nodded.

“The only way this works is if the true target is Supergirl,” J’onn said thoughtfully. “I say we make that assumption, and I say we play right into their hands.”

\------

Maxwell Lord’s day had taken a turn for the worse.

Alex Danvers had killed one of the men he’d sent to kidnap her. She’d shot a second in the leg, rendering him useless, and left another with two cracked ribs from a bullet lodged deeply in kevlar. Now she’d left her guard bleeding and concussed in a hallway and had somehow escaped with her gun.

She was, by far, the most troublesome Omega he’d ever met.

“Figure it out,” he yelled over the phone to the man who oversaw security on the lower levels and made sure that no one who wasn’t supposed to be on premises managed to find their way onto them. “I don’t care how you catch her. Just do it. Alive and as unharmed as possible if you can, but if not, just make sure she doesn’t leave the building.”

All he wanted to do was kill Supergirl. It wasn’t asking too much, in the grand scheme of things. A being that had the power to subjugate all human life was hiding out among them, slowly making humans dependent on their intervention, and he wanted to kill it. And now, because no one could do their fucking jobs, his hard won piece of bait was on the loose. He hadn’t even had time to put his bait to good use. He’d taken no pictures. Sent no messages. All of that effort, and he’d gotten so distracted by the fact that his hostage had let herself be bred by the Kryptonian – with all of the attendant possibilities – that he hadn’t even managed to make her record a desperate plea for help.

If they brought her back alive, it’d be the first thing he did.

\------

A door burst open three floors below her. Excited shouts filled the stairwell, voices overlapping, but all with the same theme – find her, stop her, bring her in. Alex redirected as quickly as she could, shouldering through the door on the sixth floor landing, gun out and finger on the trigger. The door bounced off of the wall, ricocheting back toward her with more force than she’d expected, and the sound reverberated through the space. When she eased the door closed behind her, she saw why. This floor, unlike the floor where she’d been held prisoner, was unfinished. There were no walls or carpet to dampen sound, just concrete and exposed I-beams. Scaffolding had been abandoned underneath an unfinished bank of overhead lights, and tools lay scattered. The work didn’t appear to be ongoing – halted, perhaps, in light of Lord’s activities. Rope hung from a pulley attached to the ceiling just beside window frames that had been sealed over with thick plastic sheeting, which let in a weak, watery light. Unfinished construction, she decided. A building on its way up, perhaps, left temporarily in the lurch when the funds disappeared and/or the megalomaniac took up residency.

The voices in the stairwell were growing closer. The wide open space left no effective hiding places, so she had to think and she needed to be quick about it.

First things first, she needed the use of her hands. She tucked the gun in the front waistband of her pants and moved to explore the tools that had been left behind. A boxcutter had been abandoned on the scaffolding, and she managed to cut through the hard plastic of the zip-ties without nicking herself. From there…

Well, the only way out from there was down.

She pulled the end of rope down from the pulley and measured off 2 widths of it as wide as her arms, fingertip to fingertip, stretched out. She used the boxcutter to cut the length from the longer pile of rope. Quickly, she wrapped it around her waist, back to front, and slid one end under the resulting loop twice. She pulled tight, and then drew the dangling ends between her legs. She worked an end from each side under the loop at either hip, back through the rope now pulled tight at an angle across each buttock, and finished by tying them off a half-hitch. The remaining rope she tied off in a square knot on her left hip, half-hitching the rest until all the ends were tucked away.

It was a serviceable Swiss seat, even if she was going to have to make this rappel without a carabiner or an anchor. She used an I-beam instead and tied a clove knot directly into the modified harness she’d created, grateful she still had her boots.

When she used the boxcutter to slice through the thick plastic, a light mid-day breeze drifted through. She tossed the length of rope over the side of the building, watched it whip down to stop a manageable number of feet above the ground, and took a deep breath as she positioned herself at the edge of the windowless window, heels backed up as far as they could go.

The door to the sixth floor flew open just as she leaned back, letting the harness take her weight as she started to rappel downward.

“There,” someone shouted, their voice muffled. “She’s gonna jump.”

Rope burned against her unprotected palm as she descended, far faster than she would have preferred.

A moment later, she heard the zip of a bullet as it flew past. She looked up and caught sight of a man leaning out and trying to line up a shot, handgun in one hand as he braced himself with the other. She watched as he closed one eye, trying to pick out where she might be against the distorting influence of the sidewalk below, and hoped that the next bullet would suffer from the same difficulties as the first. And then, with a sinking stomach, she watched as he seemed to reconsider. He pulled back, looked down at the rope dangling off of the side of the building, reached behind him, and unsheathed a knife.

She was halfway down. Forty or fifty feet left until she was at the ground, Alex calculated, but she could probably survive a fall if she managed to cover most of it before he severed the rope. There was no way to cover it, of course. She was already descending at a dangerous speed. Any faster, and she might as well let go of the rope and take her chances. Whether or not she could actually feel the vibration through the rope as he began to cut, Alex felt like she could. She felt like she could feel each strand of rope sever, the coil unwinding under the stress of her weight.

For a few inches, she felt like she was free falling. She’d doubled the rope when she’d attached it to the anchor, but he’d managed to cut through one side of it. Alex watched helplessly as it fell, limp and useless, to the ground below, the sharp blade of his knife making quick work of the task.

Seconds later, the rope in her hand went slack, and she closed her eyes and fell.

\------

Supergirl had never flown with such urgency in her life. Despite the part of her that called for her to be doing everything she could to find Alex, she’d taken J’onn’s advice. She’d returned to the solar recovery bed, cranked it up as high as it would go, and soaked in every bit of healing UV light she could. At the time, it’d felt like a lesson in frustration, but now, watching Alex forced into free fall, she was grateful for every ounce of energy it had returned to her.

Alex grunted as Kara caught her, careful to let her arms give a little along with Alex’s weight. The last thing she wanted to do was break ribs even though her impulse was to hold her as tightly as possible.

“Kara?” Alex blinked up at her, dumbfounded, as Kara deposited her on a street many, many blocks away from the place where she’d been held captive. “How did you… What are you doing here?”

“Trying to save you,” Kara said, tracing shaking fingers along the side of Alex’s face, “but you were already busy doing that yourself. Oh Rao, Alex. You were… If I hadn’t been there…”

Kara’s emotions were a tangled jumble in Alex’s chest – heartbreak, fear, elation, fury, and an overwhelming sense of relief. She was crying openly, hands flitting over Alex’s shoulders and down her arms, as if Kara couldn’t quite reassure herself that Alex was alive and whole.

“Hey,” Alex soothed, sliding her shaking hand behind the back of Kara’s neck and over the now fully healed bite. “I’m okay. You were there. You saved me. You did.”

Under the touch, Kara slumped forward, wrapping Alex in a too tight hug.

“You’re not okay.” Kara’s face was pressed tight to her neck, drawing in Alex’s scent in desperate, frantic huffs. She pulled away, expression anguished as she took in the cuts and scrapes decorating Alex’s skin. “You’re hurt.”

Giddy with her own relief and soon-to-crash adrenaline, Alex kissed her. She kissed her the way someone who’d plucked her from the sky deserved to be kissed, with her hands in Kara’s hair and her tongue a gentle tease of greater rewards yet to come.

“I’m okay,” she reassured again, and pressed her forehead to Kara’s. She tried to stop shaking, bleeding off the rush of chemicals that had pushed her through her escape, but found she couldn’t.

“I woke up and you were gone, Alex. I couldn’t feel you. I couldn’t hear your heartbeat.”

She smiled a weak, shaky smile. “But you found me.”

“I was almost too late. Just a few more seconds and you… you would have been…” Her face crumpled and her knees almost buckled and the only thing holding Kara together was Alex.

She wanted to stay there, with Kara wrapped up in her arms, but some things were more important.

When she pulled away, she slid her hands to Kara’s cheeks and held her steady. “Kara, listen to me. Maxwell Lord kidnapped me. He wanted to use me as bait to lure you in, but when he found out I was pregnant and the baby was yours, that became his priority.” The words penetrated slowly, but as they did, Kara straightened. Her face hardened into stone, and her anger flowed through Alex, a hot tide that washed away everything else. “You have to stop him. That’s the only thing that matters right now. He’s not allowed to take any piece of my family away from me.”

Kara pressed a hard, desperate kiss to her mouth and took to the sky.

\------

“There you are,” Maxwell Lord murmured, his smile victorious. Alex Danvers may have been rescued, but no matter. She’d served her purpose in the end. Supergirl was hovering just outside of his building, hopefully as reckless as she was furious, not even bothering to dodge out of the way of his machines as they attacked. He’d increased the Kryptonite load after the disappointment of the first outing.; if Supergirl’s friends were going to join the fight, then he’d just have to kill her faster.

“Why, were you looking for me?”

The words came from behind him and he spun in confusion, and there she was, standing just a few feet away. He blinked and looked out the window again, but, no… she was still there, hovering, driving her fist into his engine of death. Not even reacting to the kryptonite glowing bright green along those sharp edges.

“Oh,” Supergirl said, covering the distance before his mind could even process the movement, “did you think I was him?”

He looked back again, but the figure had morphed somehow. What had been Supergirl was now something else entirely, big and green, with a red X on the front of his black suit.

She plucked the tablet he was holding– the one he had been using to orchestrate the bringers of her _death_ – out of his hands and casually cracked it half and then half again. Outside, his machines stalled, cut off from the programming giving them purpose. Inside, the air around them grew superheated as her eyes flared with the brilliance of the sun, and he stumbled backwards, nearly tripping in his haste to run.

Supergirl grabbed him by the front of the shirt and lifted him as if he weighed nothing. “You tried to kill me,” she said, her voice a disconcerting, icy calm. “That comes with the territory. But then you went after my mate. You threatened my child.”

Her grip had pulled his shirt tight around his neck. The fabric cut into his skin painfully, impeding both his intake of oxygen and the blood flow to his brain, and he felt his world growing dark around the edges. “You and anything that might come from you is a curse on this world,” he bit out, scrabbling fruitlessly at the hand holding him with all of the gentle care of an iron claw. “You’re not Earth’s champion. I am. When I kill you, they’re going to thank me.”

She lifted him higher, up above her head so the only place he could look was down at her unforgiving face. At her eyes, hot as a superheated star and ready to cut him in half.

“Earth is my home. It welcomed me when my planet was destroyed, and living on it has given me the power to help others. Unlike you, I don’t use my gifts to try and destroy.” With an unexpected suddenness, she released him. Lord hit the floor hard, gasping for air, and Kara took a step back. After a moment, her eyes returned to normal and she looked past him, out over the city she called home. “In a minute, people are going to come, and they’re going to take you away. You deployed stealth technology in the middle of an urban center. You could have killed innocents, and you didn’t care. That’s an act of terrorism. You kidnapped a federal agent. I may not agree with it in theory, but you’re going to disappear. If you’re lucky, I’ll never see or hear of you again.”

After a moment, she pulled herself from her contemplation of the skyline and knelt down so that they were eye-level. She pinned him with her gaze and gave free rein to the Alpha buried within her. In the face of it, Lord shrank away, eyes averted and neck bared, whimpering piteously. “If Alex had died, there wouldn’t have been enough of you left to find. I don’t kill – not even the people who try to kill me – but you came after my family. Whatever power you think you have, know that it’s nothing. Consider this your final warning. Look their way again, and I’ll put you down.”

For a moment, she let herself bask in the unrestrained display of dominance.

When she felt he understood what she was promising, she touched the comms unit in her ear. “Send in the team,” she said, and waited until he was securely in custody before leaving him behind.

\------

**_Epilogue_ **

Alex tried not to laugh when Kara met her for her ultrasound appointment with her hair in the highest ponytail she’d ever seen her wear.

“Don’t,” Kara said, blushing, when Alex opened her mouth to tease.

Instead, Alex caught a handful of the hem of Kara’s thin, form-fitting henley. “All I was going to say is that you look good in this.”

There was still a bit of a fumble at the receptionist’s desk. _This is literally why I put money in my flex spending account_ , Alex said, glaring at her until Kara put her credit card away. But, there’d been no dismissive looks from the woman behind the desk, and when the nurse appeared at the door and called Alex’s name, Kara followed after her, hand in hand.

She held back a smile when Alex stared down in distaste at the gel smeared across her abdomen, and at the way she startled when the doctor pressed the wand to her skin. The night before, Alex had worked herself into a quiet tizzy in anticipation of the visit, settling only when Kara had drawn the sheets over them and held her, pressing soft kisses to the top of her head, until Alex had finally drifted off the sleep. The morning had full of shy smiles, and Alex pressing her hand to her stomach self-consciously, until Kara had pressed her back against the kitchen counter and kissed her until Alex had lost the ability to think at all.

The doctor made a noise of curious discovery and the wooshing sound of a quick heartbeat filled the room.

Kara’s heart nearly burst with joy.

“Well, look at that. Kara, didn’t you say your family had a history of twins?”

Kara nodded distractedly even as she squinted at the grainy image onscreen, trying to suss out proto-Danvers. “My mother was a twin.”

In a flash, Alex had curled up on her elbows, nearly disrupting the procedure, to stare aghast at the screen. “No,” she said, going pale.

The doctor grinned. “I’m afraid so. Here we have baby one, and here we have baby two.”

It took a few seconds for Kara to fully grasp what she’d heard.

“Two?” She looked from the doctor’s amused face to Alex’s queasy one. “Twins? We’re going to have twins?”

In her excitement, she neglected to account for the doctor’s presence when she cupped Alex’s cheek and swept in for a kiss. She may have ended up with a bit of ultrasound gel on the front of the henley Alex had so admired, but it was a worry for later.

“Two, Alex,” she whispered reverentially, having pushed Alex back down to the examination table in her enthusiasm. Alex, nigh to drowning in the pride and love nearly saturating her, merely sighed in affectionate exasperation.

There was a click and whir of machinery, and the doctor laid a photo print in Alex’s hand. “For the refrigerator,” she said, giving Alex a wink over the top of Kara’s head. “I’ll leave you to your celebration. Keep it tasteful.”

Kara barely waited until the door was closed to scramble up on the examination table on top of Alex. “We made two,” she said, pressing a kiss to the underside of Alex’s jaw.

“Somebody’s proud of herself.”

Kara shrugged, her expression turning introspective and shy. “That day at the Fortress, after the red k, I thought I’d lost my family. I couldn’t have dreamed that we’d be here. And now, despite everything, I have you and we have them.”

Even though Alex had promised herself she wasn’t going to cry, she did. A little.

“I guess we do,” she said, brushing her thumb over the mark she’d scarred into the back of Kara’s neck, inordinately pleased when Kara melted into her in response. “Now take me home so we can celebrate—” She pushed the words out through a throat made tight with shared joy— “Doctor’s orders.”

Alex’s yelp of indignation echoed down the practice’s hallways as Kara lifted her off of the table and made for the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Another WIP. I've clearly lost my mind. This is where I [tumbl](http://outlyingoutlier.tumblr.com/) Head's up - if you use this to anon me that I should go kill myself for writing this, know I will just block/delete/report you. Save us both the time and effort.


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